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Some  Religious  Impli¬ 
cations  of  Pragmatism 


JOSEPH  ROY  GEIGER 


PHILOSOPHIC  STUDIES 

ISSUED  UNDER  THE  DIRECTION  OF  THE  DEPARTMENT  OF 
PHILOSOPHY  OF  THE  UNIVERSITY  OFCHICAGO 

NUMBER  9 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS 
CHICAGO,  ILLINOIS 


THE  BAKER  &  TAYLOR  COMPANY,  New  York 
THE  CAMBRIDGE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  London  and  Edinburgh 
THE  MA R UZEN-KA BUSHIKI-KA ISHA ,  Tokyo,  Osaka,  Kyoto,  Fukuoka,  Sendai 
THE  MISSION  BOOK  COMPANY,  Shanghai 


The  Department  of  Philosophy  of  the  University  of  Chicago  issues 
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reprints  of  articles  previously  published. 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF 

PRAGMATISM 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF 

PRAGMATISM 


JOSEPH  ROY  GEIGER 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CHICAGO  PRESS 
CHICAGO,  ILLINOIS 


Copyright  1919  By 
The  University  of  Chicago 


All  Rights  Reserved 


Published  November,  1919 


Composed  and  Printed  By 
The  University  of  Chicago  Press 
Chicago,  Illinois,  U.S.A. 


1 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Introduction  . .  i 

II.  The  Religious  Problem  in  Its  Historical  Setting  ...  4 

III.  The  Pragmatic  Doctrines  of  Reality,  Knowledge,  and 

Truth . 10 

IV.  Religious  Realities  . 17 

V.  Religious  Knowledge . 29 

VI.  Religion  and  Theology . 36 

VII.  God  . 43 

VIII.  Religious  Worship  and  Social  Control . 50 


V 


CHAPTER  I 


INTRODUCTION 

Two  things  there  are,  said  Kant,  which  are  worthy  of  man’s  rever¬ 
ence,  “the  starry  heavens  above  and  the  moral  law  within.”  This  out¬ 
burst  of  scientific  enthusiasm  and  moral  fervor  may  be  fairly  said  to 
epitomize  the  spirit  and  the  motif  of  modern  philosophy.  Whenever 
and  wherever  our  modern  life  has  presented  its  problems  or  vouchsafed  • 
its  satisfactions  one  or  the  other,  or  both,  of  these  interests  have  been 
implicated.  And  philosophic  thought  has  taken  its  cues  accordingly. 
Not  every  thinker  has  been  as  catholic  in  his  interests  as  was  Kant.  To 
some  the  “starry  heavens  above”  have  seemed  all-important,  while  to 
others  the  “moral  law  within”  has  made  the  strongest  appeal.  But 
few  thinkers,  no  matter  how  great  their  bias  in  one  direction,  have  been 
insensible  to  the  problems  lying  in  the  other  direction.  And  the  pro- 
foundest  systems  of  philosophy  have  come  from  those  men  who,  like 
Kant,  have  been  concerned  with  both  the  natural  and  the  spiritual,  the 
real  and  the  ideal,  the  “is”  and  the  “ought,”  have  felt  these  to  be  incom¬ 
patible  and  have  sought  to  penetrate  to  some  deeper  principle  of  unity. 

This  more  fundamental  principle  of  unity,  however,  has  not  been 
forthcoming.  Spinoza’s  “God  or  Nature,”  Kant’s  “Thing  in  Itself,” 
Hegel’s  “Absolute,”  and  Spencer’s  “Unknowable” — all  are  but  grim 
testimonies  of  the  persistence  of  the  problem.  It  is  as  urgent  today  as 
it  was  in  an  earlier  and  more  metaphysical  age.  To  be  sure,  we  have 
become  suspicious  of  the  possibility  or  the  worth  of  “ultimate ”  principles 
and  impatient  with  any  philosophy  which  attempts  to  formulate  such 
principles.  With  the  development  of  scientific  methods,  our  practical 
problems  have  so  multiplied  and  our  immediate  experience  has  become 
so  engaging  as  to  leave  us  little  time  or  inclination  for  the  consideration 
of  problems  of  a  more  strictly  philosophic  character.  Furthermore,  as 
knowledge  has  become  more  and  more  specialized,  a  sort  of  division  of 
labor  has  served  to  isolate  the  various  fields  of  human  interests  and 
activities,  and  to  obscure  the  fact  of  their  connections.  But,  while  this 
specialization  of  knowledge  has  its  advantages,  it  likewise  has  its  dangers. 
The  quality  of  the  work  done  by  the  particular  sciences  is  apt  to  be 
impaired  by  too  rigid  an  isolation  of  their  respective  fields.  Life 
itself  is  not  made  up  of  clearly  marked  off  fields  of  interest  and  activities. 


2 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


Its  areas  overlap.  Of  course,  it  is  profitable  for  certain  purposes  and 
within  certain  limits  to  treat  some  particular  group  of  phenomena 
without  regard  to  the  relation  of  these  to  other  phenomena.  But  the 
reason  for  this  relative  isolation  of  various  groups  of  phenomena  are 
precisely  those  which  look  toward  the  enrichment  of  life  and  toward 
establishing  and  maintaining  its  organic  character.  To  the  extent  that 
specialization  furthers  these  ends  it  is  legitimate.  But  there  is  no  prac¬ 
tical  or  scientific  virtue  in  mere  specialization  of  knowledge  and  isolation 
of  the  sciences,  as  such.  The  very  considerations  which  demand  a  divi¬ 
sion  of  labor  among  the  sciences  likewise  demand  a  more  general  science 
or  discipline  whose  task  it  is  to  serve  as  a  sort  of  clearing  house  for  the 
adjustment  of  conflicts  arising  out  of  such  an  artificial  way  of  conceiving 
life.  “ Every  science,”  says  Professor  Dewey,  “in  its  final  standpoint 
and  working  aims  is  controlled  by  conditions  lying  outside  of  itself — 
conditions  which  subsist  in  the  practical  life  of  the  time.”1  But  the 
conditions  with  reference  to  which  the  standpoint  and  working  aims 
of  a  given  science  are  to  be  determined  must  themselves  be  criticized 
and  evaluated  from  the  point  of  view  of  other  and  broader  areas  of 
experience.  Such  a  criticism  and  evaluation  can  be  accomplished  only 
by  the  sort  of  discipline  indicated  above.  This  discipline,  to  be  sure, 
cannot  be  a  science  of  “first  principles”  in  any  ultimate  or  metaphysical 
sense.  It  will  not  have  access  to  realms  of  reality  inaccessible  to  the 
particular  sciences.  It  must  rely  on  the  general  method  of  procedure 
employed  by  the  particular  sciences.  That  is  to  say,  it  must  proceed 
by  means  of  hypothesis  and  experimentation.  But  it  will  construct 
hypotheses  which  are  relevant  to  its  own  data  and  problems  and  execute 
its  experiments  accordingly. 

And  thus,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  aims  and  the  methods  of 
modern  science  would  seem  to  leave  no  place  for  a  philosophic  dis¬ 
cipline — indeed,  because  of  this  very  fact,  the  demand  for  just  such  a 
discipline  is  the  most  persistent  and  most  vital  scientific  problem  of  our 
day.  In  the  words  of  a  contemporary  writer,  “the  demand  (for  a  syn¬ 
thesis  of  experience)  remains,  and  with  every  new  discovery  of  science, 
every  advance  in  the  ideals  of  art  and  of  the  conduct  of  life,  every 
development  in  religious  faiths,  comes  anew  the  task  of  philosophy — to 
criticize  and  through  criticism,  to  make  a  fresh  attempt  to  interpret, 
from  the  unity  of  reason,  the  manifold  of  life.”2 

xJohn  Dewey,  “Logical  Conditions  of  a  Scientific  Treatment  of  Morality,” 
Decennial  Publications  of  the  U niversity  of  Chicago ,  III. 

2  J.  H.  Tufts,  The  Teleology  of  Kant ,  p.  48. 


INTRODUCTION 


3 


Now,  the  most  notable  instance,  perhaps,  of  the  need  of  this  type 
of  philosophic  criticism  and  interpretation  is  in  connection  with  the 
“ conflict”  between  theology  and  the  natural  sciences.  Facts  could  be 
cited  to  show  that  our  modern  life  has  suffered  immeasurably  by  reason 
of  the  ambiguity  and  confusion  growing  out  of  this  “conflict.”  The 
natural  sciences  and  theology  do  not,  as  is  commonly  held,  occupy 
independent  and  isolated  spheres.  The  areas  of  experience  with  which 
they  are  concerned  overlap.  They  have  common  interests.  The  rela¬ 
tive  and  abstract  concepts  with  which  they  severally  operate  are  not 
adequate  to  serve  as  “cosmic  principles,”  or  even  to  provide  the  foun¬ 
dations  of  “independent  ”  systems  of  knowledge.  Both  theology  and  the  * 
sciences  are  confronted  with  problems  for  the  solution  of  which  they 
must  look  beyond  their  own  immediate  data.  This  means  that  for  the 
purposes  of  these  problems  the  categories  which  they  respectively 
employ  need  themselves  to  be  made  the  objects  of  scientific  scrutiny — 
to  be  criticized  and  interpreted  from  the  point  of  view  of  other  areas 
of  experience.  But  there  has  been  too  little  of  this  sort  of  thing.  On 
the  one  hand,  theology,  relying  upon  a  supernatural  revelation  or  upon 
an  equally  supernatural  reason,  has  dogmatically  asserted  its  self- 
sufficiency  and  has  persistently  ignored  the  facts  of  science.  On  the 
other  hand,  science,  having  paid  so  dearly  for  its  emancipation  from 
theological  prejudice,  has  come  to  doubt  that  “any  good  thing  can  come 
out  of  Nazareth.”  It  has  usually  explained  religious  phenomena  by 
explaining  them  away.  It  has  measured  the  truth  of  religious  ideas  by 
showing  that  these  ideas  cannot  be  true. 

Now  this  dilemma  of  a  theology  which  is  not  scientific  enough  and 
a  science  with  little  or  no  appreciation  of  the  religious  point  of  view  is 
a  constant  challenge  to  any  way  of  thinking  which  presumes  to  effect 
by  criticism  and  interpretation  a  greater  unity  within  the  several  areas 
of  experience.  This  study  is  undertaken  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
urgency  of  this  challenge.  It  is  concerned  with  the  religious  problem 
as  it  has  come  to  be  formulated  in  the  history  of  modern  thought.  It  is 
proposed  to  examine  this  problem  in  the  light  of  its  historical  background, 
and  more  particularly,  to  determine  what  implications  there  are  for  an 
adequate  treatment  of  it  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  current  philo¬ 
sophical  movement  known  as  “pragmatism.” 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  RELIGIOUS  PROBLEM  IN  ITS  HISTORICAL  SETTING 

The  religious  problem  as  it  has  persisted  in  modern  philosophy  is 
but  a  part  of  the  more  general  problem  of  epistemology.  The  epistemo¬ 
logical  point  of  view  is  the  philosophic  articulation  of  the  difficulties 
incident  to  the  breakdown  of  the  doctrine  of  supernatural  revelation. 
These  difficulties  were  at  first  essentially  theological.  Mediaeval 
theology  was  the  foundation  of  the  entire  social  and  political  super¬ 
structure  comprising  the  secular  world  of  the  Middle  Ages.  It  acquired 
the  prestige  and  power  essential  to  such  a  position  through  its  doctrines 
of  supernatural  revelation  and  divine  authority.  And  the  historical 
reasons  for  the  development  of  these  doctrines  are  obvious.  In  the  first 
place,  the  Church  was  the  source  of  all  learning  and  culture  throughout 
the  “Dark  Ages.”  It  was  the  school  wherein  the  western  races,  but 
lately  emerged  from  barbarism,  learned  the  lessons  of  self-control  and 
self-direction.  To  meet  the  demands  made  upon  it,  the  Church  needed 
to  be  sure  of  itself;  it  must  speak  in  no  uncertain  terms;  its  utterances 
must  be  authoritative.  To  this  end  it  assimilated  the  doctrines  of 
Hebrew  religion,  the  ideas  of  Greek  philosophy  and  art,  and  the  prin¬ 
ciples  of  Roman  law,  formulated  these  into  an  elaborate  system  of  dogmas 
and  constructed  thereon  a  theory  of  the  world.  No  method  was  at  hand 
for  criticizing  and  interpreting  these  elements  of  culture,  inherited  from 
the  past,  in  the  light  of  present  conditions  and  needs.  The  prophetic 
insight  of  the  Hebrew  seers,  the  speculative  and  creative  genius  of  the 
Greek  philosophers  and  artists,  the  practical  wisdom  of  the  Roman 
jurists — these  belonged  to  a  day  that  was  dead.  The  best  that  moral 
earnestness,  unillumined  by  native  genius  and  untaught  by  personal 
experience,  could  do  was  to  fall  back  on  the  ideas  and  institutions  of  an 
earlier  and  wiser  age  and  stamp  these  with  the  authority  of  a  divine 
revelation. 

But  the  urgency  of  the  immediately  practical  situation  was  not  the 
only  motive  for  the  dogmatism  of  mediaeval  theology.  Its  ultimate 
concern  was,  not  to  provide  the  foundations  of  the  world  that  now  is, 
but  rather  to  point  the  way  to  the  world  that  is  to  be.  It  was  not  so 
much  concerned  with  establishing  and  maintaining  the  natural  order 
as  with  mediating  to  immortal  souls  the  reality  of  the  supernatural  order. 


4 


RELIGIOUS  PROBLEM  IN  ITS  HISTORICAL  SETTING 


5 


Thus  the  religious  object  at  this  time  was  the  supernatural  or  the  trans- 
experiential  order  as  over  against  the  natural  order  as  given  in  everyday 
experience.  The  religious  object,  however,  was  not  always  so  conceived. 
An  empirical  study  of  the  origin  and  development  of  religions  serves 
to  eliminate  certain  intellectualistic  presuppositions  as  to  the  essential 
character  of  the  religious  interest.  In  particular,  it  appears  that  the 
effort  to  describe  primitive  religions  as  involving  a  more  or  less  conscious 
attitude  of  worship  toward  supernatural  beings  or  deities,  or  as  involving 
a  more  or  less  conscious  sense  of  communion  with  a  supernatural  order, 
is  based  on  a  false  analogy  growing  out  of  an  inadequate  psychological 
analysis.  A  more  adequate  analysis  from  the  point  of  view  of  functional 
psychology  shows  that  primitive  religion  so  far  from  being  essentially 
intellectualistic,  or  so  far  from  involving  supernatural  factors,  was  bound 
up  with  the  vital  life-giving,  life-preserving  activities  of  the  social  group, 
and  was  in  reality  the  expression  of  the  group’s  attitude  toward  these 
activities.  The  origin  of  religion  is  to  be  sought  in  the  origin  of  the 
social  consciousness.  “The  religious  consciousness  is  to  be  identified 

with  the  consciousness  of  the  greatest  values  of  life . This  sense 

of  value  is  the  feeling  of  the  worth  of  life  which  expresses  itself  in  the 
demand  for  self-preservation.”1  Whatever  objects  preserve  and  promote 
life,  such  as  sources  of  food  supply,  means  of  social  organization,  and 
the  like,  come  to  have  religious  significance  and  finally  get  themselves 
accepted  and  worshiped  as  deities.  But  these  deities  are  not  necessarily 
supernatural.  They  simply  represent  the  highest  social  values.  And 
this  conception  of  the  divine  as  the  embodiment  of  the  highest  social 
values  persists  throughout  the  history  of  religions.  This  accounts  for 
its  constantly  changing  content.  For  example,  in  the  earlier  periods  of 
Hebrew  history,  the  divine  was  identified  with  certain  forms  of  animal 
life  which  happened  to  be  the  chief  source  of  food  supply.  Later  on 
when  the  tribes  united  to  form  one  social  and  political  organization,  the 
maintenance  of  the  integrity  of  this  organization  against  the  trickery 
and  the  treachery  of  hostile  groups  came  to  be  the  matter  of  supreme 
concern,  whereupon  the  divine  was  conceived  after  the  fashion  of  a 
mighty  monarch,  whose  function  it  was  to  preserve  the  social  and  political 
integrity  of  his  people.  With  the  downfall  of  the  nation  and  the  collapse 
of  the  existing  social  order,  new  values  were  conceived  and  embodied 
in  the  person  of  Yahweh.  These  new  values  were  partly  ethical. 
Yahweh  could  no  longer  be  a  tribal  or  national  god  and  retain  the 
respect  of  his  defeated  and  disheartened  people.  He  must  henceforth 
1  E.  S.  Ames,  The  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  168. 


6 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


be  international.  His  interests  must  be  world-wide.  He  could  not  be 
concerned  with  the  destiny  of  nations  as  such,  but  only  with  the  manner 
in  which  nations  work  out  his  righteous  will  and  thereby  serve  the  ends 
of  truth  and  justice.  But  this  high-water  mark  in  Hebrew  religion  was 
reached  by  only  a  few  of  its  prophets  and  seers.  The  rank  and  file  of 
the  people  continued  to  look  forward  to  the  restoration  of  their  historical 
kingdom,  in  a  natural  way,  until  events  had  gone  so  far  and  their  political 
situation  had  become  so  desperate  that  there  could  no  longer  be  any  hope 
of  a  natural  restoration.  Then  began  the  apocalyptic  movement  in 
Hebrew  religion.  Yahweh  was  now  thought  of,  indeed,  as  a  world-god; 
but  he  was,  nevertheless,  supposed  to  be  concerned  with  the  fortunes 
of  a  “ chosen’’  people.  In  the  “ fulness  of  time”  he  would  terminate  the 
present  order  of  things  by  a  cataclysmic  exercise  of  his  power  and  usher 
in  a  new  dispensation  in  the  interest  of  his  followers. 

The  religious  object  thus  assumes  for  the  Hebrews  an  essentially 
supernatural  character.  It  was  to  be  profoundly  modified,  however, 
by  its  contact  with  Greek  metaphysics.  Not  long  after  the  final  down¬ 
fall  of  the  Hebrew  nation  Greek  society  and  civilization  underwent  a 
similar  disintegration.  As  a  counterpart  to  the  supernatural  god  and 
supernatural  world  conceived  by  the  Hebrews,  as  compensatory  ideas, 
the  Greeks  developed,  on  an  immeasurably  higher  level  of  culture  and 
with  thorough  philosophical  sophistication,  the  concepts  of  a  metaphysi¬ 
cally  ultimate  principle  and  of  a  realm  of  Perfect  Being.  Now  in  the 
first  centuries  after  Christ,  when  Christianity  was  finding  it  necessary 
to  formulate  itself  into  a  body  of  doctrines,  both  these  concepts,  namely, 
the  Hebrew  “supernatural”  and  the  Greek  metaphysical  ultimate,  were 
taken  over  and  utilized.  When  they  were  finally  assimilated  by  Chris¬ 
tian  theology,  they  came  to  stand  for  two  definitely  recognized  traits 
or  aspects  of  the  Divine  Being,  namely  his  personal,  political,  anthropo¬ 
morphic  activities  and  his  super-personal,  rational,  metaphysically 
ultimate  signification.  In  the  hands  of  Saint  Thomas  Aquinas,  these 
concepts  were  made  to  yield  their  full  implications  for  the  position  and 
the  power  of  the  Church.  According  to  Saint  Thomas  there  are  to  be 
distinguished  three  realms  of  knowledge.  The  first  of  these  is  the  realm 
of  reason,  the  second  the  realm  of  revelation,  and  the  third  the  realm 
of  beatific  vision  or  mystical  insight.  As  to  the  first  of  these,  it  was  held 
that  reason  is  a  competent  and  legitimate  method  of  knowledge  in  the 
world  of  physical  nature.  By  studying  nature  the  reason  will  be  inevi¬ 
tably  led  to  the  notion  of  a  divine  intelligence — the  metaphysical  ultimate 
of  the  Greeks.  But  a  study  of  nature  under  the  laws  of  reason  will  never 


RELIGIOUS  PROBLEM  IN  ITS  HISTORICAL  SETTING 


7 


yield  any  vital  or  personal  knowledge  of  God.  For  example,  reason 
will  never  discover  that  God  is  a  Trinity,  or  that  he  has  vouchsafed  to 
redeem  the  world  through  the  death  of  his  Son  and  the  divinely  appointed 
ordinances  of  the  Church.  These  and  other  personal  attitudes  and 
activities  he  chooses  to  acquaint  man  with  independent  of  man’s 
reason;  and  this  he  does  through  revelation.  The  third  kind  of  knowl¬ 
edge,  that  of  beatific  vision,  is  reserved  for  the  saints  and  mystics  in 
this  life  and  for  all  the  faithful  in  the  life  to  come. 

Thus  mediaeval  theology  was  concerned  with  just  those  attributes 
of  the  divine  nature  which  were  admittedly  inaccessible  to  the  reason. 
Hence  the  doctrines  of  a  revealed  truth  and  of  divine  authority.  Now, 
with  the  breakdown  of  these  doctrines  at  the  time  of  the  Renaissance 
religious  philosophy  fell  back  upon  the  “inner  light”  of  the  individual 
and  by  means  of  rational  speculation  rehabilitated  theology.  But  as 
soon  as  philosophy  had  time  to  criticize  the  work  of  its  hands,  it  dis¬ 
covered  that  its  God  was  not  the  finite,  personal  God  of  the  Hebrews 
and  of  traditional  theology,  but  rather  the  metaphysical  ultimate  of  the 
Greeks.  This  discovery  was  made  in  connection  with  the  elimination  of 
miracles.  Man’s  reason  demanded  a  perfect  God,  but  a  perfect  God 
would  not  need  to  resort  to  miracles  to  carry  on  the  world-order.  If  a 
perfect  God  made  the  world,  the  world  must  of  necessity  be  the  “best 
of  all  possible  worlds.”  And  there  was  obviously  no  occasion,  in  such  a 
world,  for  a  personal,  finite  God. 

But  even  the  metaphysical  God  of  deism  and  natural  religion  was 
soon  to  be  called  in  question.  It  was  John  Locke  who  took  the  first 
step  in  this  direction.  When  he  declared  that  prior  to  all  metaphysical 
speculation  an  inquiry  should  be  made  into  the  nature,  limits,  and  worth 
of  human  knowledge,  he  set  in  motion  a  movement  of  epistemological 
criticism,  culminating  in  the  philosophy  of  Hume  and  Kant,  which  put 
an  end  once  for  all  to  the  theological  pretensions  of  dogmatic  rationalism. 

The  critical  philosophy  of  Hume  and  Kant  stimulated  the  most 
fruitful  period  of  modern  philosophy.  The  tendencies  growing  directly 
out  of  the  penetrating  criticisms  and  the  profoundly  constructive  sug¬ 
gestions  of  these  two  systems  fixed  the  main  outlines  of  philosophic 
thought  throughout  the  nineteenth  century  and  down  to  our  own  time. 
It  was  in  connection  with  these  tendencies  that  the  religious  problem 
assumed  its  most  crucial  form.  We  must  indicate  in  a  word  what  these 
tendencies  were. 

In  the  first  place  there  was  a  reaction  against  all  theological  pre¬ 
tensions  of  philosophy  and  an  emotional  and  pietistic  reinstatement  of 


8 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


orthodox  doctrines,  including  those  of  revelation  and  authority.  This 
movement  assumed  a  vigorous  and  aggressive  form  and  enjoyed  an 
extensive  following  during  the  first  half  of  the  century.  After  that  it 
was  forced  to  make  a  number  of  far-reaching  concessions  to  science  and 
to  critical  thought  in  general,  so  that  today  it  can  hardly  be  said  to  be 
holding  its  own.  As  a  counterpart  of  the  revival  of  orthodox  theology 
there  was  a  feeling  of  scientific  emancipation  from  any  sort  of  obligation 
on  the  part  of  philosophy  to  theology.  This  new  sense  of  scientific 
freedom  and  intellectual  daring  came  to  be  generalized  into  such  phi¬ 
losophic  tendencies  or  movements  as  the  materialism  or  “mechanism” 
of  C.  Vogt  and  L.  Buchner;  the  positivism  of  Auguste  Comte  and 
J.  S.  Mill;  the  mystical  agnosticism  of  Herbert  Spencer;  and  the  evolu¬ 
tionistic  monism  of  Haeckel  and  Ostwald.  All  these  movements  are 
generally  characterized  by  the  one  term,  naturalism.  A  third  tendency, 
one  having  its  roots  in  the  transcendental  idealism  of  Kant,  and  known 
as  the  “new”  or  “objective”  idealism,  reached  its  climax  in  the  system 
of  Hegel.  During  the  last  two  or  three  decades  this  movement  has  been 
given  new  life  and  vigor  in  England  and  America  in  the  writings  of  such 
men  as  the  Cairds,  T.  H.  Green,  Bradley,  Bosanquet,  and  Royce.  A 
fourth  tendency  was  an  attempt  to  develop  the  implications  of  the 
Kantian  dualism  and  thus  to  conceive  reality  from  two  perfectly  inde¬ 
pendent  points  of  view,  namely,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  theoretical 
reason  and  the  practical  reason,  or  moral  intuition,  respectively.  The 
most  influential  exponents  of  this  type  of  doctrine  are  the  theologian, 
Ritschl,  and  the  spiritualistic  idealist,  Rudolph  Eucken.  Finally,  there 
are  two  contemporary  movements  which  have  their  roots  partly  in  the 
voluntaristic  tendencies  in  the  philosophy  of  Kant,  but  chiefly  in  the 
more  general  movements  of  which  the  Kantian  philosophy  was  but  one 
expression.  These  are  the  creative  evolution  of  Henri  Bergson  and  the 
pragmatism  of  William  James  and  John  Dewey.  Both  of  these  move¬ 
ments  represent  a  reaction  against  intellectualism.  But  whereas  the 
former  urges  its  criticisms  in  behalf  of  certain  ultimate  metaphysical 
interests,  the  latter  is  concerned  all  the  while  with  the  practical  interests 
constituted  by  immediate  experience. 

Now  it  is  with  this  last-named  movement,  namely,  pragmatism, 
that  we  are  concerned  in  the  study  which  we  propose  to  undertake.  All 
the  other  types  of  doctrine  indicated  are  implicated  in  the  religious 
problem,  to  be  sure,  and  any  adequate  treatment  of  the  problem  must 
take  some  account  of  them.  We  shall  find  it  necessary,  however,  to 
restrict  our  consideration  of  their  bearing  upon  our  problem  to  the  fact 


RELIGIOUS  PROBLEM  IN  ITS  HISTORICAL  SETTING 


9 


that  they  have  fixed  the  form  in  which  the  problem  presents  itself. 
More  particularly,  these  types  of  doctrine  have  approached  the  religious 
problem  with  certain  presuppositions  which  predetermined  the  form 
in  which  the  problem  must  be  recognized  and  treated.  These  presupposi¬ 
tions  have  as  a  rule  been  concerned  with  epistemological  and  metaphysi¬ 
cal  considerations  and  have  posed  the  question  of  the  nature  of  religious 
reality,  the  possibility  of  religious  knowledge,  and  the  truth  of  religious 
ideas.  The  limits  of  our  study  will  not  permit  an  exposition  of  the 
actual  historical  movements  tending  to  fix  the  religious  problem  in  these 
forms.  And,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  purposes  of  our  study  do  not  require 
it.  It  is  sufficient  to  note  that  the  sort  of  study  we  propose  to  make 
must  face  the  type  of  questions  indicated  above  and  must  be  prepared 
to  examine  and  criticize  the  metaphysical  and  epistemological  presuppo¬ 
sitions  lying  back  of  them. 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  PRAGMATIC  DOCTRINES  OF  REALITY,  KNOWL¬ 
EDGE,  AND  TRUTH 

We  come,  then,  to  the  consideration  of  the  pragmatic  point  of  view: 
what  are  its  implications  for  the  religious  problem  ?  The  religious 
problem  in  its  historical  form,  as  we  have  seen,  concerns  the  reality 
of  the  religious  object,  the  possibility  of  religious  knowledge,  and  the 
truth  of  religious  ideas.  Now  it  is  obvious  that  the  competency  of  any 
philosophical  system  or  point  of  view  to  deal  with  the  problem  in  this 
form  in  any  adequate  way  depends  for  the  most  part  on  its  conception 
of  reality,  its  theory  of  knowledge,  and  its  criterion  of  truth.  Tradi¬ 
tional  philosophies  might  be  shown  to  be  wanting  in  the  matter  of  their 
religious  implications  at  one  or  the  other  or  all  of  these  points.  And 
if  pragmatism  is  to  prove  more  fruitful  or  more  suggestive  for  the  inter¬ 
pretation  of  religious  realities  and  for  the  criticism  and  evaluation  of 
religious  knowledge  and  truth,  this  must  be  by  reason  of  its  general 
doctrines  concerning  reality,  knowledge,  and  truth. 

What,  then,  in  the  first  place  is  its  general  doctrine  concerning 
reality  ?  What  is  its  'conception  of  the  real  ?  To  begin  with,  it  must 
be  said  that  pragmatism  has  no  doctrine  of  reality,  i.e.,  ultimate  reality, 
or  reality  at  large.  It  conceives  the  real  in  wholly  empirical  terms.  It 
knows  nothing  of  a  transcendental  reality,  whether  in  the  form  of  the  hy¬ 
pothetical  entities  of  natural  science,  or  in  the  form  of  trans-experiential 
“things-in- themselves.”  It  insists  that  whatever  reality  there  is  must 
be  constituted  by  experience.  And  by  “  experience,”  pragmatism  does 
not  mean  the  piecemeal,  chopped-up,  done-with  affair  conceived  by 
traditional  empiricism  and  accepted  by  rationalism  as  a  true  account 
of  what  experience  is.  When  it  identifies  reality  with  experience,  it 
proposes  to  take  experience  radically,  i.e.,  just  as  it  is,  in  all  its  immediacy 
and  with  all  its  multitude  of  diverse  interests.  It  would  attribute 
reality  to  permanence  as  well  as  to  change,  to  product  as  well  as  to 
process,  to  relations  as  well  as  to  terms,  to  continuity  and  organization 
as  well  as  to  discontinuity  and  flux.  Conceived  thus,  experience  is 
its  own  excuse  for  existing.  It  has  its  own  values.  It  sets  its  own 
problems.  It  exhibits  its  own  realities.  And  these  empirical  realities 
are  not  to  be  construed  as  being  in  any  sense  the  manifestations  or 


IO 


PRAGMATIC  DOCTRINES 


II 


appearances  of  a  more  fundamental  order  of  existence,  or  as  posing  a 
problem  of  ultimate  reality. 

Pragmatism,  then,  has  no  theory  of  reality  at  large.  Its  funda¬ 
mental  postulate  is  that  things  are  what  they  are  experienced  as — that 
a  thing’s  reality  consists  in  its  being  experienced  as  this,  that,  or  the 
other.1  The  doctrine  that  things  are  what  they  are  experienced  as  is 
not,  however,  to  be  identified  with  the  fundamental  presupposition  of 
idealism,  namely,  that  the  reality  of  things  consists  in  their  being 
known.  For  knowing  is  only  one  among  a  number  of  equally  natural 
modes  of  experiencing. 

To  assume  that  because  from  the  standpoint  of  the  knowledge  experience, 
things  are  what  they  are  known  to  be,  therefore  metaphysically,  absolutely 
without  qualification,  everything  in  its  reality  (as  distinct  from  its  appearance 
or  phenomenal  occurrence)  is  what  a  knower  would  find  it  to  be,  is,  from  the 
immediatist’s  standpoint,  if  not  the  root  of  all  philosophic  evil,  at  least  one 
of  its  main  roots.  For  this  leaves  out  of  account  what  the  knowledge  stand¬ 
point  is  itself  experienced  as.2 

Metaphysically,  knowing  is  no  more  real  than  any  other  mode  of  ex¬ 
perience  ;  and  metaphysically,  reality  is  no  more  constituted  by  the  know¬ 
ing  process  than  it  is  by  any  other  process  within  experience.  Pure 
or  immediate  experience,  to  be  sure,  has  its  cognitive  aspects.  But 
these  aspects  as  being  cognitive  do  not  fix  the  character  of  other  aspects 
as  being  real.  They  have  no  inherently  distinctive  character  elevating 
them  to  a  higher  plane  of  reality.  They  are  only  things  or  events  like 
other  experienced  things  or  events,  which,  for  the  time  being,  and  within 
the  limits  of  a  given  situation,  have  acquired  significance  and  value 
by  reason  of  their  being  capable  of  standing  for  or  referring  to  certain 
other  items  of  experience.  So  that  their  function  is  not  that  of  mediating 
a  knowledge  of  realities  which  would  otherwise  remain  outside  of  experi¬ 
ence,  or  of  representing  existences  which  get  their  status  in  reality  by 
thus  being  known.  Their  function  is  rather  that  of  serving  as  instru¬ 
mentalities  for  referring  to  and  anticipating,  and  thereby  controlling, 
future  experience. 

But  the  identification  of  reality  with  experience  implies  in  the  next 
place  that  it  is  dynamic.  It  is  all  the  while  moving,  changing,  growing. 
It  exhibits  spontaneity  and  novelty.  Its  future  is  undetermined.  It 
is  still  in  the  making.  It  is  not  the  absolute  flux  of  Heraclitus,  to  be 

1  Dewey,  Influence  of  Darwin  on  Philosophy ,  and  Other  Essays ,  p.  227. 

2  Ibid.,  pp.  229-30. 


12 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


sure.  It  has  its  continuities,  its  stable  areas,  its  finished  aspects.  But 
these  do  not  make  reality  any  the  less  dynamic.  They  do  not  have  their 
being  apart  from  the  process  in  which  they  were  produced.  They  are 
not  out  of  the  running.  They  are  functions  within  the  process.  They 
are  the  connecting  links  between  the  old  and  the  new — the  means  of 
controlling  and  directing  the  future  course  of  events.  Only  a  non- 
empirical  empiricism  or  a  transcendental  idealism  could  miss  the  moving, 
changing,  growing  character  of  reality.  Only  a  rationalism,  hardened 
to  the  desperate  urgency  of  immediate  experience,  having  no  regard 
for  the  practical  issues  of  life,  could  overlook  the  fact  that  reality  is  not 
in  a  state  of  equilibrium;  that  it  is  divided  against  itself,  has  its  tensions 
and  conflicts;  and  that  in  readjusting  itself  at  these  points,  it  is  acquir¬ 
ing  new  momentum,  giving  itself  new  directions,  effecting  new  realities. 
In  a  world  like  this,  equilibrium  is  the  one  thing  impossible.  There  is 
an  ever  recurrent  conflict  of  tendencies.  The  course  of  things  is  con¬ 
stantly  meeting  with  obstacles,  constantly  being  turned  aside.  And 
these  obstacles  and  conflicts  furnish  the  conditions  of  change  and 
development;  they  are  the  occasion  of  readjustment  and  expansion. 

Reality,  then,  for  pragmatism  is  empirical;  it  is  dynamic;  and 
finally,  it  is  practical.  In  calling  reality  “practical”  the  pragmatist 
means  to  assert  that  man’s  interests  and  needs,  his  endeavors  and 
achievements,  are  all  implicated  in  its  structure  and  in  its  development. 
Experience  as  the  general  mode  of  reality  has,  as  we  have  seen,  its 
tensions  and  conflicts  which  prove  to  be  the  occasions  of  readjustment 
and  expansion.  But  these  are  not  tensions  and  conflicts  in  general. 
They  are  tensions  and  conflicts  for  someone  at  sometime.  They  con¬ 
stitute  specific  situations.  They  imply  the  interaction  of  an  organism 
with  certain  other  natural  energies  within  an  environing  medium.1 
Their  issue  involves  some  participation  on  the  part  of  the  organism  in 
the  course  of  things.  If  this  participation  is  by  way  of  direct  response, 
if  it  is  a  matter  of  blind  submission,  of  brute  acquiescence,  the  issue  may 
be  said  to  have  been  mechanically  determined.  In  that  case  reality 
has  readjusted  itself,  but  not  freely  and  prosperously.  But  the  participa¬ 
tion  of  the  organism  in  the  course  of  things  may  be  indirect.  Its  response 
may  be  suspended.  The  light  of  previous  experience  may  be  brought 
to  bear  on  the  present  situation,  making  it  possible  to  anticipate  future 
consequences.  If  this  be  the  case,  the  stimulus  finally  reacted  to  will 
not  be  the  brute  fact  of  immediate  experience,  but  this  fact  plus  its 
anticipated  consequences.  Participation  will  thus  be  intelligent,  free, 

1  Dewey,  Creative  Intelligence ,  p.  n. 


PRAGMATIC  DOCTRINES 


13 


prosperous.  It  will  be  a  matter  of  controlling  the  course  of  things, 
giving  them  direction  and  fixing  their  character  as  being  good  or  bad.1 

In  conceiving  reality  to  be  practical  in  the  sense  that  human  needs  • 
and  aspirations  and  efforts  are  implicated  in  its  structure  and  develop¬ 
ment,  pragmatism  is  but  applying  in  a  thorough  going  way  the  principle 
insisted  upon  long  ago  by  Kant.2  The  world,  said  Kant,  grows  up — 
comes  to  be — within  our  experience.  We  help  to  make  it.  By  the 
operation  of  the  laws  of  thought  upon  the  raw  material  of  sensation  we 
construct  the  only  reality  we  know  anything  about.  Furthermore,  the 
dominating  principle  of  this  creative  process,  the  interest  which  is  always  * 
present  guiding  and  determining  the  constructive  operations  of  thought, 
is  that  of  unity,  that  is,  continuity  and  adjustment.  It  is  true  Kant 
thinks  of  these  constructive  principles  of  thought,  as  having  their  origin 
apart  from  the  only  function  they  can  possibly  perform,  namely,  the 
organization  of  experience.  And  he  likewise  thinks  of  the  end  or  the 
ideal  with  reference  to  which  the  categories  operate  as  having  its  origin 
and  sanction  outside  of  experience  and  yet  as  making  certain  demands 
upon  thought  in  relation  to  experience.  In  these  matters  the  prag¬ 
matist  has  left  Kant  behind.  He  sees  in  the  shift  which  Kant  is  forced 
to  make  from  a  transcendental  to  a  functional  use  of  the  categories  of 
thought,  from  a  constitutive  to  a  regulative  use  of  the  ideas  of  reason, 
further  evidence  of  the  practical  character  of  reality.  The  organizing 
functions  of  experience  and ,  the  ideal  and  hypothetical  principles  or 
ends,  on  the  presupposition  of  which  these  functions  operate,  are  them¬ 
selves  practical.  They  have  their  roots  in  experience.  They  have 
formed  themselves  in  the  presence  of  and  in  contact  with  the  subject- 
matter  which  furnishes  the  occasions  for  their  operations ;  have  wrought 
themselves  out  under  the  stress  of  human  needs  and  wants  and  purposes. 

So  much  for  pragmatism’s  doctrine  concerning  reality.  How  about 
its  theory  of  knowledge  and  its  criterion  of  truth  ?  It  is  obvious  that 
with  the  conception  of  reality  which  has  been  indicated  above,  it  must 
have  a  radically  different  view  of  the  function  of  knowledge  and  of  the 
nature  of  truth  from  those  held  in  traditional  circles.  More  particularly, 
knowledge  cannot  be  regarded  as  an  “  external  relation  ”  existing  between 
the  organism  and  its  environment.  Nor  can  it  be  regarded  as  an  act 
whereby  the  mind  of  a  knower  becomes  aware  of  an  external  and  given 
world.  Nor,  once  more,  can  it  be  thought  of  as  a  process  of  constructing 
and  sustaining  in  ideal  form  the  whole  of  reality  as  it  may  present  itself 
in  momentary  sensation.  For  pragmatism,  the  antitheses  implied  in 

1  Ibid.,  p.  22.  3  Witter,  Pragmatic  Elements  in  Kant,  pp.  16-17. 


14 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


such  statements  of  the  knowledge  process  simply  do  not  exist  except 
at  the  problematic  moment  when,  by  reason  of  the  tension  and  conflict, 
reality  loses  for  the  time  being  its  immediate  character  and  passes  into 
certain  mediate  phases,  that  is,  assumes  certain  cognitive  aspects.  At 
such  a  time,  and  with  reference  to  the  problem  presented,  the  immediacy 
of  experience  breaks  up  into  a  subject-object  relationship;  the  individual 
stands  over  against  reality  or  the  world;  a  process  of  analysis  differ¬ 
entiates  certain  elements  or  factors  as  constituting  the  situation  and 
these  are  articulated  in  certain  series  of  connections.  But  these  are 
all  abstract  ways  of  taking  reality.  They  have  no  significance  outside 
the  problematic  moment.  If  they  facilitate  a  treatment  of  the  problem 
and  thereby  effect  a  readjustment  of  reality  with  itself,  they  give  way 
once  more,  as  mediate  phases  of  experience,  to  further  immediate  phases. 

The  pragmatist,  then,  has  no  problem  of  knowledge  in  general  just 
as  he  has  no  object  of  knowledge  in  general.  He  does  not,  like  the  ideal¬ 
ist,  generalize  the  subject-object  relationship,  appearing  at  the  moment 
of  his  problem,  into  a  cosmic  situation  in  which  the  individual,  as  a 
knower  in  general,  is  set  over  against  reality  at  large,  and  then  proceed 
to  evoke  a  mysterious  and  miraculous  knowledge  to  bring  the  individual 
and  reality  together.  Nor  does  he,  like  the  realist,  elevate  the  hypo¬ 
thetical  and  trans-experiential  elements  into  which  natural  science 
analyzes  the  bit  of  reality  directly  implicated  in  its  problem  into  meta¬ 
physical  entities  and  then  assign  to  ideas  the  dubious  task  of  repre¬ 
senting  or  copying  the  world  thus  conceived.  Knowledge,  for  the 
pragmatist,  is  a  function  within  experience.  It  has  no  transcendental 
reference.  It  does  not  bring  the  individual  into  an  awareness  of  an 
object  in  general,  or  a  reality  at  large.  It  refers  to  particular  objects, 
to  concretely  experienced  things  and  events.  But  its  reference  to  these 
is  not  that  of  representing  or  copying  existences  which  are  given  and 
done  with,  but  rather  that  of  indicating  the  use  to  which  these  may 
be  put. 

As  a  function  within  experience,  as  the  characteristic  instrument 
through  which  reality,  at  its  moments  of  tension  and  conflict,  readjusts 
and  expands  itself,  knowledge  is  to  be  regarded  as  but  one  natural  factor 
or  energy  among  other  such  factors  or  energies.  It  operates  in  a  per¬ 
fectly  natural  way.  It  does  not  effect  a  wholesale  and  instantaneous 
change  in  things  by  merely  bringing  them  within  its  scope.  Its  reaction 
upon  the  course  of  events,  the  difference  it  makes  in  future  experience, 
is  indirect.  It  does  not  annihilate  “unwelcome  facts”;  it  anticipates 
them  and  thereby  either  controls  them  or  avoids  them.  It  does  not 


PRAGMATIC  DOCTRINES 


15 


evoke  a  prosperous  turn  of  events  by  any  mysterious,  sleight-of-hand 
trick;  it  secures  the  co-operation  and  support  of  natural  energies  by 
the  manner  in  which  it  enables  the  individual,  as  knower,  to  participate 
in  these  processes,  namely  with  foresight  and  purpose. 

The  only  problems  of  knowledge  when  knowledge  is  thus  conceived 
are  problems  of  specific  structure  and  function.  Precisely  what  sort 
of  an  experience  is  the  knowledge-experience  ?  How  do  natural  energies 
combine  to  produce  it  ?  What  are  its  occasions  ?  What  consequences 
may  be  expected  to  flow  from  it  ?  What  differences  will  it  make  in  future 
experience?  What  is  to  determine  its  worth  or  validity?  These  are 
the  only  legitimate  problems  of  knowledge.  They  have  a  more-than- 
particular  reference,  to  be  sure.  And  when  solved,  the  conclusions 
reached  have  a  more-than-particular  validity.  But  while  such  questions 
most  certainly  constitute  general  problems  respecting  knowledge,  they 
are  not  problems  of  knowledge  in  general  apart  from  the  concrete 
subject-matter  furnishing  its  occasions  and  verifications.  They  do  not 
arise  out  of  the  epistemological  predicament  at  all,  and  are  not  to  be 
solved  with  reference  to  epistemological  considerations. 

Now  just  as  the  pragmatist  has  no  problem  of  reality  at  large,  and 
no  problem  of  knowledge  in  general,  so  he  has  no  problem  of  absolute 
truth.  For  the  pragmatist,  truth  is  always  concrete;  it  always  has 
specific  reference.  In  talking  about  it  he  prefers  to  use  the  adjective 
rather  than  the  abstract  noun.  Certain  aspects  of  experience,  i.e.,  ideas, 
are  said  to  be  true  on  occasion  with  reference  to  certain  other  aspects. 
That  is  to  say,  there  are  no  particular  things  or  realities  set  off  by 
themselves  as  constituting  a  realm  of  truth.  Truth,  as  Professor  James 
remarks,  is  something  which  happens  to  realities  by  reason  of  their 
standing  in  a  certain  relation  to  other  realities.1 

Truth  is  predicated  of  an  idea  with  reference  to  its  symbolic  or  repre¬ 
sentative  character,  i.e.,  with  reference  to  the  fact  that  it  stands  for 
and  points  to  something  else.  But  as  was  pointed  out  in  the  case  of 
knowledge,  this  reference  or  representation  is  not  a  matter  of  copying 
or  mirroring  an  external  world,  or  of  constructing  in  ideal  form  the  whole 
of  reality.  For  in  these  cases  truth  would  seem  to  be  either  impossible 
or  meaningless.  The  truth  of  ideas  so  employed  would  consist  in  the 
degree  of  faithfulness  with  which  the  copying,  or  the  reconstructing,  as 
the  case  might  be,  should  be  accomplished.  But  note  the  ambiguity 
of  such  a  criterion.  On  the  one  hand,  if  the  external  world  or  ultimate 
reality  were  not  present  to  consciousness  so  that  the  idea  in  question 

1  James,  Pragmatism ,  p.  201. 


i6 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


might  be  referred  to  it  for  comparison,  how  would  the  comparison  take 
place  and  the  relative  faithfulness  of  the  ideal  copy  or  construction  be 
determined  ?  On  the  other  hand,  if  reality  were  present  to  conscious¬ 
ness,  why  must  the  mind  resort  to  representing  or  reconstructing  it  in 
ideas  ?  Ideas  represent  other  realities  in  the  sense  that  they  express  in 
symbolic  form  the  meaning  and  value  of  those  realities  in  terms  of  the 
consequences  which  may  be  expected  to  flow  from  them. 

Sometimes  the  meaning  and  value  so  represented  are  well  established 
and  are  used  simply  as  instruments  or  tools,  ready-made,  as  it  were,  for 
organizing  and  controlling  further  experience.  At  other  times  the  idea 
may  be  tentative.  The  context  into  which  it  is  brought  continues  to 
be  ambiguous  and  problematic.  It  is  uncertain  whether  the  meaning 
and  value  represented  by  the  “ concept”  or  “ universal”  is  adequate  for 
interpreting  the  situation  into  which  it  is  projected,  or  not.  And  it  is 
this  uncertainty  which  raises  the  question  of  the  truth,  or  the  lack  of 
truth,  attaching  to  the  idea.  If  the  meaning  and  value  represented  in 
the  idea  is  adequate  for  the  interpretation  of  the  ambiguous  situation; 
that  is,  if  it  actually  succeeds  in  anticipating  consequences  and  enables 
the  pent-up  processes  to  move  forward,  thereby  restoring  the  immediacy 
of  experience  at  that  point,  the  idea  is  said  to  be  true.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  readjustment  of  reality  with  itself  is  not  thus  facilitated,  the 
idea  is  said  not  to  be  true,  in  which  case  it  must  either  be  modified  or, 
if  this  prove  impossible,  be  given  up  and  another  idea  tried  out. 


CHAPTER  IV 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  indicate  precisely  what  the  religious 
implications  of  pragmatism  are.  The  type  of  questions  which  prag¬ 
matism  must  face  if  it  treats  the  religious  problem  in  its  traditional 
form  is,  as  we  have  seen,  somewhat  as  follows:  Does  the  religious  object 
exist  ?  Is  it  real  ?  How  can  we  know  its  reality  ?  What  is  to  be  the 
criterion  of  the  truth  of  our  ideas  concerning  it  ?  But  the  fundamental 
presupposition  implied  in  such  statements  of  the  problem  is  that  there  is 
a  problem  of  religious  reality,  of  religious  knowledge,  and  of  religious 
truth  in  general,  or  at  large.  And  it  is  just  this  presupposition  that 
pragmatism  denies.  Like  all  other  problems,  religious  problems  must  be 
specific;  they  must  have  their  origin  and  their  termination  within  the 
limits  of  a  concrete  situation.  Pragmatism  recognizes,  to  be  sure,  that 
there  are  problems  of  a  general  nature  concerning  the  particular  realities 
constituted  by  religious  experience  and  concerning  the  nature  and 
function  of  religious  ideas.  But  such  problems,  it  thinks,  must  have 
specific  reference,  and  must  be  solved  from  the  point  of  view  of  such 
reference. 

In  the  first  place,  then,  pragmatism  recognizes  no  problem  of  religious 
reality  in  general.  If  the  religious  object  may  be  said  to  exist  at  all, 
it  must  exist  as  a  part  of  experience;  if  it  is  real,  its  reality  must  be 
empirical.  Any  statement  of  the  religious  problem  which  implies  that 
religious  reality  stands  over  against  or  is  external  to  the  individual, 
would  seem  to  have  missed  the  whole  point  of  modern  epistemological 
criticism  and  to  hark  back  to  the  mediaeval  dualism  of  God  and  the 
world.  If  the  epistemological  movement  had  any  significance  at  all  it 
was  that  no  such  dualism  characterizes  reality;  that  the  natural  and  the 
supernatural,  the  human  and  the  divine,  the  world  and  God,  are  dis¬ 
tinctions  which  fall  within  experience.  To  use  any  of  these  categories, 
therefore,  as  if  they  contained  a  trans-experiential  reference,  is  to  revert 
to  pre-Kantian  dogmatism.  And  this  has,  of  course,  come  to  be  accepted 
in  critical  circles  as  a  commonplace — a  truism.  No  one  since  the  time  of 
Hume  and  Kant  has  presumed  to  hold  philosophic  converse  with  trans- 
experiential  realities.  Empiricism  and  rationalism,  naturalism  and 
idealism,  alike  insist  that  God,  if  God  there  be  at  all,  must  be  immanent — 


17 


18  SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 

must  belong  to  the  world  of  our  experience.  Why,  then,  it  may  be  urged, 
does  pragmatism  raise  the  question  of  the  possibility  of  a  religious  object 
conceived  in  trans-experiential  terms  ?  If  in  all  philosophic  quarters  it 
is  agreed  that  reality  (religious  or  otherwise)  must  be  accessible  to  knowl¬ 
edge,  that  it  must  be  present  in  experience,  either  as  immediate  value  and 
meaning,  or  as  rational  and  necessary  implications,  is  not  pragmatism’s 
insistence  that  the  religious  problem  must  not  be  so  stated  as  to  imply 
a  trans-experiential  God  beside  the  mark — a  case  of  putting  up  a  man  of 
straw  ?  The  pragmatist  does  not  think  so.  It  is  precisely  a  part  of  his 
thesis  that  the  naturalist,  or  the  idealist,  in  so  far  as  he  has  a  problem  of 
knowledge  in  general,  and  in  so  far  as  he  professes  to  effect  such  a  solution 
of  this  problem  as  to  enable  him  to  hold  converse  with  a  reality  at  large, 
ignores  the  principle  on  which  he  claims  to  stand,  namely,  that  knowl¬ 
edge  is  of  things  which  we  experience.  Experience  implies  no  ultimate 
reality  and  poses  no  problem  of  knowledge  in  general.  The  philosopher 
who  says  that  it  does  has  a  preconceived  and  non-empirical  notion  of 
what  experience  is,  or  a  preconceived  and  intellectualistic  notion  of 
what  reality  is,  or  both.  And  in  any  case,  he  has  committed  the  unpar¬ 
donable  sin,  philosophically  speaking:  he  has  reinstated  the  discredited 
and  disreputable  ding  en  sich.  And  it  does  not  help  matters  any  that 
religious  interests  are  the  supposed  beneficiaries  of  this  illicit  transaction. 
Reality  at  large,  even  though  postulated  in  behalf  of  religious  interests 
or  conceived  as  the  object  of  the  religious  consciousness,  is  an  abstraction. 
It  cannot  be  given  any  intelligible  content.  It  lies  outside  the  range  of 
experience  and  is  of  no  practical  significance  in  morality  or  religion. 

And  so  the  pragmatist  feels  called  upon  to  insist  on  the  empirical 
character  of  religious  reality.  It  is  not  to  be  appropriated  all  at  once  in 
a  sort  of  spasm  of  moral  earnestness.  The  values  and  meanings  which 
it  constitutes  are  hard  won.  They  are  not  to  be  had  for  the  asking. 
Their  achievement  involves  aspiration  and  struggle  and  manifold  prob¬ 
lems. 

Whatever  peculiar  characteristics  religious  realities  may  exhibit,  then, 
they  exhibit  the  general  characteristics  of  other  empirical  realities. 
They  are  constituted  by  experience.  They  do  not  get  their  status  as 
being  real  from  any  prerogative  which  they  may  be  conceived  to  have 
as  objects-to-be-known.  Ordinarily,  they  do  not  come  within  the  scope 
of  knowledge  at  all.  They  are  immediately  experienced  meanings  and 
values.  They  serve  as  stimuli  to  wholesome  and  prosperous  reactions 
in  the  life-process.  So  long  as  they  perform  this  function,  they  are  not 
objects-to-be-known;  it  is  only  when  they  are  implicated  in  some  prob- 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 


19 


lematic  situation  that  they  become  such.  And  even  then  the  problem  is 
not  that  of  knowing  them  as  existences  which  are  finished  and  done  with, 
but  rather  that  of  anticipating  the  actual  consequences  which  may  be 
expected  to  flow  from  them. 

So  much  for  the  general  characteristics  of  religious  realities.  What¬ 
ever  else  they  are,  they  share  the  characteristics  common  to  all  realities. 
That  is  to  say,  they  are  empirical,  dynamic,  and  practical.  What,  then, 
are  their  characteristics  qua  religious  ?  How  are  they  to  be  differentiated 
from  other  realities?  To  answer  this  question  in  an  adequate  way 
requires  some  reference  to  the  matter  of  the  origin  and  development  of 
religion.  A  true  account  of  what  a  thing  now  is  involves  some  insight  ’ 
into  its  history.  Let  it  be  understood,  however,  that  we  do  not  here 
confuse  the  categories  of  genesis  and  value.  We  quite  agree  with 
Professor  Tufts  when  he  says: 

We  cannot  test  our  truth  by  the  “experience”  of  the  child  or  savage.  We 
have  moved  on  and  found  new  evidence  in  the  life  of  the  Spirit.  If  the  human¬ 
ity  of  a  later  time  is  to  have  a  larger  vision,  a  larger  and  richer  revelation,  it 
must  test  this  by  its  own  higher  life.1 

And  yet  we  must  reiterate  that  present  value  can  only  disclose  itself, 
can  only  get  itself  accepted,  in  the  light  of  a  historical  prospective. 
Values  do  not  come  to  us  ready-made.  They  grow  up.  They  have  a 
history.  Their  authority  is  that  of  a  process  serving  a  function  and 
exhibiting  a  continuity  and  development.  And  this  is  precisely  why 
Professor  Tufts  adds  to  the  lines  quoted  above  that  humanity  “will 
never  outgrow  the  need  of  studying  the  profound  and  priceless  deeds 
through  which  the  divine  has  been  revealed.  ” 

We  have  said  that  an  empirical  study  of  the  origin  and  development 
of  religion  serves  to  eliminate  certain  intellectualistic  presuppositions  as 
to  the  essential  character  of  the  religious  interest;  that  so  far  from  being 
intellectualistic  (involving  a  more  or  less  conscious  attitude  of  worship 
toward  supernatural  beings  or  deities),  primitive  religion  was  bound 
up  with  the  vital,  life-giving,  life-preserving  activities  of  the  group, 
and  was,  in  reality,  the  expression  of  the  group’s  attitudes  toward 
these  activities.  We  have  said  that  the  origin  of  religion  is  to  be  sought 
in  the  social  consciousness,  and  that  the  social  consciousness  is  itself, 
in  part,  the  feeling  of  the  supreme  worth  of  life,  a  sense  of  life’s  high 
values,  which  expresses  itself  in  the  demand  for  self-preservation.  We 
must  now  pursue  these  considerations  a  step  farther. 

1  Tufts,  “The  Ultimate  Test  of  Religious  Truth,”  American  Journal  of  Theology , 
XIV,  24. 


20 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


In  the  first  place,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  the  vital,  life-giving,  life¬ 
preserving  activities  of  the  social  group,  with  which  primitive  religion  is 
bound  up,  have  their  origin  in  the  most  elementary  instincts  of  the  race. 
Just  what  these  instincts  were  must  be  largely  a  matter  of  conjecture. 
It  is  as  impossible  to  get  back  to  absolute  beginnings  as  it  is  to  anticipate 
ultimate  endings.  Certainly  the  consciousness  of  primitive  man  must 
have  been  of  a  much  simpler  character  than  the  consciousness  of  a  civi¬ 
lized  man  of  today.  And  the  interests  of  a  primitive  social  group  must 
have  been  correspondingly  less  complex.  It  would  not  seem  to  be 
unreasonable,  therefore,  to  attempt  to  describe  the  impulses  and  interests 
of  early  group  life  in  some  such  simple  terms  as,  for  example,  food,  sex, 
self-protection,  gregariousness,  and  the  like.  But  whether  the  earliest 
activities  of  man  centered  about  just  these  interests,  and  whether  there 
were  two  or  three  or  a  dozen  such  interests,  would  seem  to  be  impossible 
to  determine.  At  any  rate,  we  leave  the  question  to  those  whose  concern 
it  is  to  speculate  about  it.  For,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we  are  not  concerned 
to  trace  the  religious  consciousness  back  to  its  absolute  beginnings. 
The  study  which  we  have  undertaken  does  not  pretend  to  be  a  history  of 
the  origin  and  development  of  religion.  Neither  does  it  presume  to  be 
a  theory  of  the  “essence”  or  ultimate  nature  of  religious  realities.  We 
are  trying  to  point  out  some  of  the  implications  for  religion  in  the 
pragmatic  doctrines.  In  the  nature  of  the  case,  these  implications  would 
not  be  historical  or  metaphysical.  Pragmatism  is  primarily  a  theory  of 
methods.  Whatever  it  will  have  to  say  with  respect  to  religious  realities 
will  be  said  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  possibility  of  scientific  control 
with  respect  to  religious  problems.  Its  religious  implications  will  not 
be  in  the  nature  of  a  criticism  and  evaluation  of  the  theological  ideas 
and  doctrines  that  have  come  to  be  accepted  as  constituting  the  meaning 
of  religion.  It  is  true  that  pragmatism  has  been  so  construed  as  to  seem 
to  afford  a  sort  of  sanction  to  certain  religious  dogmas.1  But  such  a 
use,  or  misuse,  of  the  pragmatic  method  is  to  lose  sight  of  its  real  import 
and  to  render  it  academic  and  formal.  Pragmatism  is  not  so  much 
concerned  with  already  constituted  meanings  as  with  meanings  that  are 
yet  to  be  constituted.  Its  program  is  not  so  much  that  of  testing  the 
truth  of  already  existing  doctrines  in  the  light  of  a  changing  experience 
as  that  of  formulating  new  doctrines  which  will  interpret  and  thereby 
control  this  experience.2  So  that  it  will  be  essential  to  the  study  we  have 
in  mind  to  make  to  conceive  religion  in  its  origin  and  development  from 

1  James,  Pragmatism ,  pp.  73,  115. 

2  Dewey,  Essays  in  Experimental  Logic ,  p.  313. 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 


21 


an  empirical  and  practical  point  of  view  rather  than  from  a  historical 
or  metaphysical  point  of  view. 

Adopting,  as  it  does,  an  empirical  definition  of  reality,  pragmatism 
cannot,  with  any  consistency,  concern  itself  with  constructing  a  meta¬ 
physic  of  religion.  And  if  it  is  said  that  in  adopting  a  definition  of 
reality  at  all,  it  is  committing  itself  to  a  presupposition,  the  import  of 
which  is  metaphysical,  the  reply  must  be  that  to  say  that  a  thing  is 
what  it  is,  that  the  reality  of  a  thing  consists  in  its  being  experienced  as 
this,  that,  or  the  other,  can  scarcely  be  classed  as  a  presupposition. 
That  things  are  what  they  are  experienced  as  would  seem  to  be  a  datum. 
We  must  start  with  it,  it  is  true.  But  we  do  not  have  to  presuppose  it 
or  assume  it.  Such  a  definition  of  the  real  can  be  called  a  presupposition 
only  by  making  a  further  presupposition,  namely,  that  experience  as 
constituting  the  real,  or  as  giving  intimations  thereof,  cannot  speak  for 
itself  and  cannot  disclose  its  own  real  nature.  But  it  is  just  this  pre¬ 
supposition  that  the  pragmatist  refuses  to  make.  He  insists  on  taking 
experience  at  its  word,  on  taking  the  meanings  or  existences  exhibited 
by  it  at  their  face  value.  In  defining  religious  realities  in  empirical 
terms  he  does  not  think  that  he  has  thereby  fixed  their  nature  meta¬ 
physically.  The  nature  of  religious  realities,  along  with  other  realities, 
is  fixed  by  experience.  Defining  them,  or  making  any  sort  of  intellec¬ 
tual  statements  about  them  neither  adds  to  nor  detracts  from  their 
nature  as  being  real.  They  are  just  what  they  are  experienced  as. 
Their  content  is  doubtless  too  rich  and  meaningful  to  be  expressed  in 
any  set  of  categories,  however  comprehensive  such  categories  may  be. 
Certain  intellectual  statements  may  be  formulated  with  reference  to 
them  to  be  sure.  And  such  intellectual  statements,  while  they  do  not 
fix  their  ontological  status  as  being  real,  may  become  instruments  for 
modifying  their  empirical  character. 

It  is  just  such  a  set  of  intellectual  statements  that  the  purposes  of 
our  study  demand.  We  must  so  conceive  the  origin  and  development 
of  religion  as  to  exhibit  therein  certain  elements  which  may  be  articu¬ 
lated  in  a  series  of  significant  connections.  Just  what  these  elements 
will  be  and  just  how  many  of  them  there  will  be  must  obviously  be 
determined  by  the  specific  demands  of  our  problem.  Our  problem  is 
to  make  such  an  analysis  of  religious  experience  as  will  enable  us  to 
utilize  the  elements  thereby  obtained  for  suggesting  what  we  regard  as 
a  fruitful  point  of  view  and  method  of  treatment  with  respect  to  religious 
problems.  The  purposes  of  our  problem  do  not  require  that  the  elements 
into  which  we  propose  to  analyze  religious  experience  shall  represent  the 


22 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


absolute  beginnings  of  religion.  All  that  is  required  is  that  these  ele¬ 
ments  shall  be  typical,  that  is,  stand  for  important  and  relevant  aspects 
of  religious  experience  as  it  has  appeared  at  various  levels  of  culture. 

When  we  say,  then,  that  primitive  religion  was  bound  up  with  the 
vital  life-giving,  life-preserving  activities  of  the  primitive  social  group, 
and  that  these  activities  had  their  origin  in  the  most  elementary  instincts 
of  the  race,  let  it  be  understood  that  we  do  not  feel  called  upon  to  enu¬ 
merate  and  identify  all  these  instincts.  And  when  we  say  that  we  take 
the  food  and  sex  impulses  as  being  typical  of  those  instincts  out  of  which 
all  religions  have  developed,  let  it  be  understood  that  we  are  not  asserting 
that  the  food  and  sex  impulses  constitute  the  essence  of  religious  interests 
and  values.  The  gregarious  instinct,  the  instinct  of  self-preservation, 
and  other  instinctive  interests  and  tendencies  are  undoubtedly  reflected 
in  the  religions  of  primitive  peoples.  Some  of  these  are  doubtless  sig¬ 
nificant  as  explaining  the  more  individualistic  and  mystical  aspects  of 
religious  experience.  But  we  must  reiterate  that  we  are  concerned  with 
religion  primarily  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  possibility  of  scientific 
control  with  respect  to  the  problems  it  presents  today.  These  problems 
are  not  theological  or  metaphysical  primarily;  they  are  social  and 
ethical.  For  this  reason  we  propose  to  view  the  development  of  religion 
and  to  analyze  present-day  religious  realities  with  reference  to  the  unfold¬ 
ing  of  the  food  and  sex  impulses.  We  believe  that  these  have  been  the 
most  important  factors  in  fixing  the  character  of  present-day  religious 
values  and  problems. 

The  earliest  religious  ideas  and  activities  were  undoubtedly  connected 
in  the  most  direct  fashion  with  man’s  efforts  to  get  food  and  to  satisfy 
his  sexual  desires.  Furthermore,  the  influence  of  the  food  and  sex  factors 
has  been  no  less  marked  in  the  development  of  religion  than  in  its  origin. 
Every  change  in  the  economic  and  social  factors  conditioning  the  vital 
attitudes  and  activities  of  society  has  been  followed  by  a  corresponding 
change  in  religious  ideas.  The  elaboration  and  refinement  of  the  food 
and  sex  factors  which  we  call  economic  and  social  organization  has  at 
the  present  time  culminated  in  the  methods  of  science  and  in  the  spirit 
of  democracy;  and  there  are  reasons  for  seeing  in  the  scientific  and 
democratic  movements  the  very  highest  expression  of  religious  interests 
and  religious  values.1 

It  appears,  then,  that  primitive  religion  must  be  thought  of  in  relation 
to  the  vital  processes  exhibited  in  the  life  of  a  group  or  community.  It 
is  functional.  It  measures  the  earnestness  and  insight  and  efficacy  of 

1  Ames,  The  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience ,  p.  396. 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 


23 


social  attitudes  toward  the  values  of  life.  Religious  ideas  or  systems  of 
theology,  when  studied  in  the  light  of  their  historical  background,  turn 
out  to  be  the  expressions  of  attitudes  and  activities  deemed  to  be  effi¬ 
cacious  for  establishing  and  maintaining  satisfactory  relations  with  what 
is  regarded  as  a  foreign  and  hostile  environment.  Similarly,  the  historic 
conceptions  of  God  or  the  divine  turn  out  to  be  the  ideal  embodiments  of 
the  highest  values  in  the  way  of  social  organization  and  control.  Finally, 
the  scientific  and  democratic  tendencies,  conditioning,  as  they  do  in  so 
vital  a  way,  the  welfare  of  the  individual  and  of  society,  are  already 
influencing  religious  practices  and  being  reflected  in  religious  ideas. 

Thus,  the  development  of  religion  has  been  a  natural  process,  serving 
vital  functions  and  exhibiting  certain  continuities.  The  present  sig¬ 
nificance  and  value  of  religion  cannot  be  understood  unless  the  history 
of  this  process  be  taken  into  account.  Nevertheless,  the  two  things  are 
not  to  be  confused.  The  present  stage  of  religious  development  has 
significance  and  value  clearly  defined  and  peculiar  to  itself.  The  history 
of  religions  reveals  something  more  than  just  a  process  of  development: 
this  process  must  be  viewed  as  involving  change;  the  movements 
exhibited  in  it  are  truly  creative.  There  are  religious  interests,  religious 
problems,  religious  values,  today  which  did  not  and  could  not  exist  at 
an  earlier  time.  And  yet  there  has  been  no  break  in  the  movement 
culminating  in  these  new  elements  of  tension,  adjustment,  and  satis¬ 
faction  which  characterize  present-day  religion.  As  in  the  case  of  every 
true  evolutionary  process,  the  evolution  of  religion  produces  the  new  only 
on  the  basis  of  the  old.  Certain  continuities  persist  throughout  the 
process.  Elements  of  change  and  variation  arise,  to  be  sure,  but  they 
always  arise  within  the  process  itself  and  are,  in  fact,  the  results  of  some 
arrangement  or  organization  of  factors  previously  realized.  Religion  has 
always  been  functional.  It  has  always  been  bound  up  with  the  vital 
activities  of  the  race.  And  these  vital  activities  have  always  been  con¬ 
nected,  directly  or  indirectly,  with  the  food  and  sex  impulses.  With  the 
elaboration  and  refinement  of  the  interests  and  activities  growing  out  of 
these  impulses  there  has  been  a  corresponding  elaboration  and  refine¬ 
ment  of  the  motif  and  technique  of  religion.  We  have  insisted  that  this 
vital  relationship  between  life  and  religion  has  persisted  even  down  to 
our  own  time.  We  have  said  that  the  foremost  movements  of  our 
modern  life,  namely,  the  movements  of  science  and  democracy,  are 
influencing  religious  practices  and  being  reflected  in  religious  ideas. 
If  we  are  right  in  adopting  such  a  view  of  the  origin  and  development  of 
religion,  we  are  in  a  position  to  do  full  justice  to  the  distinctive  character 


24 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


of  present-day  religious  interests,  problems,  and  values,  and  at  the  same 
time  to  regard  them  as  having  a  history,  as  having  arisen  in  a  natural 
process,  as  being  the  outcome  of  natural  factors. 

Wherein,  then,  consists  the  distinctive  character  of  present-day 
religion?  It  consists,  we  take  it,  in  the  fact  that  its  interests  and 
problems  and  values  are  ethical  and  spiritual.  That  is  to  say,  while 
religion  is  still  primarily  concerned  with  preserving  and  promoting  life, 
its  motif  has  been  socialized  and  its  technique  has  been  rationalized. 

On  the  one  hand,  the  elemental  instincts  of  the  race,  the  “ground 
patterns”  of  human  life,  have  been  so  elaborated,  social  and  economic 
institutions  have  become  so  complex,  that  the  preservation  and  pro¬ 
motion  of  life  as  it  now  is  involves  a  new  type  of  attitudes  and  activi¬ 
ties,  new  methods  of  co-operation,  new  standards  of  value,  new  capacities 
for  appreciating  the  things  which  conduce  to  the  general  welfare.  With 
the  rise  of  democracy  as  a  form  of  social  organization,  there  was  a  tend¬ 
ency  to  translate  the  political  values  so  achieved  into  theological  terms. 
For  example,  the  notion  of  kinship  was  substituted  for  that  of  sovereignty 
(the  notion  indigenous  to  the  Hebraic  conception  of  God  and  to  mediaeval 
theology)  in  conceiving  the  divine.  This  tendency  culminated  in  the 
last  century  in  the  doctrine  of  the  “fatherhood  of  God  and  the  brother¬ 
hood  of  man.  ”  A  new  type  of  religious  experience  followed  this  change 
of  imagery;  humanitarianism,  altruism,  philanthropy,  of  which  we 
have  heard  so  much  in  recent  years,  would  seem  to  be  its  natural  expres¬ 
sion.  And  while  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  these  religious  attitudes 
have,  for  the  most  part,  been  wholesome  and  beneficent,  yet  they  seem 
to  have  run  their  course,  to  have  performed  their  function.  They  do 
not  exactly  square  with  the  psychological  conditions  nor  express  the 
vital  interests  of  present-day  life.1  A  new  type  of  democracy  is  required 
as  the  basis  of  social  co-operation  and  organization,  one  based,  not  on 
a  metaphysical  theory  of  natural  rights,  but  on  a  new  sense  of  personal 
worth  and  personal  need.  This  demand  for  a  new  type  of  democracy 
is  intimately  related  to  certain  tendencies  and  problems  exhibited  in 
present  industrial  movements.2  The  effectiveness  of  our  present  indus¬ 
trial  system  to  produce  the  necessities  of  life  is  patent  enough.  What  is 

\ 

less  obvious,  but  of  far  greater  moment,  is  that  this  system,  with  its 
machine-like  organization  and  its  one-sided  method  of  distribution, 
presents  a  fearful  peril  to  the  masses  of  ordinary  workmen  on  whose 
shoulders  its  burdens  rest.  What  is  required  to  avert  this  peril,  to 

1  Tufts,  “The  Adjustment  of  the  Church  to  the  Psychological  Conditions  of  the 
Present,”  American  Journal  of  Theology ,  XII,  119. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  179. 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 


25 


preserve  to  the  workman  his  personal  freedom  and  individuality,  and  to 
secure  to  him  his  just  deserts  in  the  way  of  goods  produced,  is  not  an 
a  priori  theory  of  natural  rights,  not  an  abstract  doctrine  of  the  father¬ 
hood  of  God  and  the  brotherhood  of  man,  not  a  sentimental  charity  or 
a  degrading  philanthropy.  These  things  we  have  in  abundance.  They 
have  given  us  our  libraries,  built  our  hospitals,  endowed  our  colleges, 
and  subsidized  our  churches.  But  as  social  remedies  they  have  all 
failed.  And  they  have  failed  because  they  are  based  upon  a  false  diag¬ 
nosis  of  our  social  ills.  What  we  need* and  what  we  must  have,  if  a 
cure  is  to  be  effected,  is  a  new  type  of  social  justice,  based  on  a  deep  sense 
of  personal  worth  and  personal  need.  The  sacredness  of  human  life, 
the  worth  of  human  character,  the  right  of  a  human  being  to  realize 
himself,  and  the  obligation  on  the  part  of  society  to  furnish  him  with  the 
means  necessary  to  this  end,  these  are  the  supreme  interests  of  our  day. 
They  must  become  a  part  of  our  social  consciousness;  they  must  mold 
our  religious  attitudes,  comprise  the  objects  of  our  devotion,  impart  to 
us  our  sense  of  the  divine. 

But  the  problems  and  values  of  present-day  religion  are  not  only 
social  and  ethical,  they  are  spiritual.  We  have  said  that  the  interests 
of  religion  have  been  socialized  and  that  its  technique  has  been  ration¬ 
alized.  Now  it  is  the  conscious  use  of  rational  methods  that  makes 
religious  problems  and  values  spiritual.1  Religious  aspiration  and 
struggle  have  always  had  for  their  counterpart  some  effort  to  get  into 
contact  with  and  to  control  the  forces  felt  to  be  responsible  for  weal  or 
for  woe.  But  in  times  past  there  was  no  consistent  connection  between 
the  values  conceived  and  the  practices  resorted  to  for  the  achievement 
of  these  values.  The  time  was  when  religion  practiced  magic,  or  per¬ 
formed  rituals,  or  gave  blind  credence  to  abstract  theologies.  But 
things  have  changed.  Religion  has  come  to  itself.  It  has  gained  some 
insight  into  its  proper  technique.  It  now  employs  methods  which  are 
wrought  out  in  the  presence  of  and  with  reference  to  its  particular 
tasks  and  problems.  And  to  the  extent  that  this  insight  into  the  relation 
between  end  and  means,  value  and  technique,  reacts  upon  and  modifies 
the  content  of  the  end  or  value,  the  end  or  value  involved  may  be  said 
to  be  spiritual. 

The  conscious  use  of  scientific  methods,  then,  is  as  important  in 
fixing  the  distinctive  character  of  present-day  religious  problems  and 
values  as  is  the  social  idealism  of  which  we  have  spoken.2  Social 

1  A.  W.  Moore,  Philosophical  Review ,  XXIV,  633. 

3  Tufts,  op.  cit.,  p.  185. 


I 


26  SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 

idealism,  apart  from  the  promotion  and  application  of  science  and  edu¬ 
cation,  would  be  worth  very  little.  Fortunately,  the  new  sense  of  per¬ 
sonal  worth  and  the  persistent  demand  for  social  justice  are  everywhere 
accompanied  by  a  demand  for  the  ways  and  means  of  determining  pre¬ 
cisely  how  personal  worth  shall  be  preserved  and  enriched;  what  social 
justice  shall  mean  in  concrete  cases,  and  how  this  shall  be  realized.  In 
view  of  the  growing  complexity  of  modern  life,  and  in  view  of  the  expand¬ 
ing  possibilities  of  meeting  life’s  issues  and  solving  its  problems  by  the 
application  of  scientific  methbds,  we  need  to  cultivate  an  attitude  of 
open-mindedness,  a  spirit  of  inquiry,  a  willingness  to  participate  in  the 
efforts  of  science  and  education,  and  to  utilize  the  results  of  these  for 
moral  and  religious  purposes.  It  is  impossible  to  estimate  how  life 
would  be  enriched,  how  human  welfare  would  be  enhanced,  under  the 
influence  of  such  a  spirit.  Certainly  it  is  destined  to  be  a  dominant  factor 
in  the  future  progress  of  humanity;  and  surely  its  cultivation  and  assidu¬ 
ous  practice  is  destined  to  be — and  is  even  now — a  matter  of  our  chief 
concern.  It  must  be  reckoned  among  our  moral  assets.  It  must  be 
associated  with  our  highest  values.  It  must  enter  into  our  conception 
of  the  divine. 

Now  it  is  important  to  note  that  the  socializing  of  religious  interests 
and  ideals  and  the  rationalizing  of  religious  methods  have  by  no  means 
come  about  as  separate  and  independent  tendencies;  on  the  contrary, 
they  have  been  inextricably  bound  up  in  the  one  process  of  preserving 
and  promoting  life,  and  eadh  tendency  has  reacted  upon  and  modified 
the  other.  On  the  one  hand,  the  conscious  use  of  rational  methods 
in  controlling  natural  forces  in  behalf  of  human  interests  was  the  immedi¬ 
ate  outcome  of  a  demand  for  present  and  first-hand  contact  with  reality. 
The  most  distinctive  characteristic  of  the  period  introducing  our  modern 
era  was  man’s  unwillingness  to  forego  all  sense  of  present  reality,  even  in 
the  interest  of  an  inheritance  incorruptible  and  eternal.  The  world 
that  now  is  had  been  conceived  to  be  imperfect,  finite,  “  infected  with 
non-being.”  All  human  interests  and  values  had  been  transferred  to 
the  world  that  is  to  be.  Present  existence  was  transitory  and  unreal, 
and  was  to  be  despised.  On  such  terms,  life  was  nothing  short  of  a 
tragedy,  unless  indeed  some  compensation  could  be  conceived  in  the 
form  of  another  and  better  mode  of  existence.  And  this  was  precisely 
the  remedy  resorted  to.  But  the  rediscovery  of  the  secular  world  of 
the  Greeks  with  all  its  beauty  and  wonder  stimulated  man’s  natural 
self  anew,  and  made  him  strangely  indifferent  to  his  erstwhile  interest 
in  the  supernatural  and  eternal.  So  that,  when  the  modern  spirit,  first 


RELIGIOUS  REALITIES 


27 


expressing  itself  in  the  intellectual  daring  and  spiritual  optimism  of  the 
Renaissance,  revelled  in  its  new  sense  of  reality,  “from  heaven  to 
earth  come  down,”  it  was  not  so  much  the  result  of  a  skepticism  with 
reference  to  theological  dogmas  as  the  inevitable  demand  of  human 
nature  that  it  be  permitted  here  and  now  to  come  to  terms  with  reality. 
This  demand,  however,  was  at  first  ambiguous.  For  although  there  was 
a  hungering  and  thirsting  after  the  real,  no  adequate  method  was  at 
hand  for  determining  just  how  the  real  was  to  be  defined  and  appro¬ 
priated.  And  it  was  this  demand  for  the  ways  and  means  for  defining 
and  appropriating  reality  that  posed  the  first  problems  of  modern  science. 
Furthermore,  these  problems  required  the  construction  of  bold  and 
unique  hypotheses,  which,  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case,  could  not  be 
immediately  verified.  Here  the  scientist’s  attitude  was  more  than  a 
curious  speculation  about  the  world  as  being  already  rational  or  moral; 
it  was  the  expression  of  the  deepest  demand  of  human  nature,  the  demand 
for  rationalizing  and  controlling  the  world  of  experience  and  the  determi¬ 
nation  to  satisfy  this  demand.  And  this  is  still  the  attitude  of  the  scien¬ 
tist  in  so  far  as  the  solution  of  his  problems  requires  insight  and  ingenuity 
and  patience.  The  scientist  is  and  must  be  an  idealist.  Combined 
with  his  idealism,  he  must  have  courage  and  patience  and  perseverance 
of  the  most  heroic  type.  This  is  the  sort  of  attitude,  the  quality  of 
faith,  the  type  of  idealism,  that  has  created  all  our  values  and  made  our 
civilization  possible.  It  is  essentially  religious.  For  religion,  at  least 
as  we  know  it  today,  is  not  a  “private,  personal  relation  between  a  man 
and  some  supernatural  source  of  character  and  power.”  It  does  not 
exhaust  itself  in  hairsplitting  speculations  about  the  attributes  of  God 
or  the  depravity  of  man.  It  is  not  a  short-cut  method  for  settling,  once 
for  all,  the  problems  of  life.  It  is  an  attitude  of  faith,  a  moral  venture¬ 
someness,  a  working  hypothesis  by  which  the  religionist  means  to  have  a 
share  in  the  solution  of  these  problems.  Religion  expresses  man’s 
deepest  needs  and  highest  aspirations;  at  the  same  time  it  strives  to 
objectify  these  aspirations,  to  impose  these  needs  upon  an  environ¬ 
ment  and  make  it  answer  to  them.  Such  has  always  been  the  spirit 
of  true  religion.  It  has  ever  been  a  venture,  a  faith,  an  effort  to 
come  to  terms  with  the  “powers  that  be.”  And  if  it  is  only  in  late 
years  that  it  has  come  to  realize  its  true  function  and  its  proper 
technique,  nevertheless  its  attitude  of  desperate  concern,  its  willing¬ 
ness  to  stake  its  all  on  a  hope  and  then  to  work  for  the  realization 
of  that  hope,  with  whatever  methods  it  may  devise,  has  been  back  of 
all  of  man’s  efforts  to  better  himself  (science  included),  to  propitiate 


28 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


the  hostile  forces  in  his  environment,  and  to  gain  the  support  of  the 
forces  felt  to  be  friendly. 

But  if  the  religious  attitude  furnished  science  with  its  motive,  it 
must  be  said  that  science  has  repaid  the  debt  with  interest.  It  has 
been  the  methods  and  the  achievements  of  modern  science  very  largely 
that  have  socialized  the  interests  and  ideals  of  religion  and  paved  the 
way  for  a  genuinely  social  and  moral  order. 

The  recognition  that  natural  energy  can  be  systematically  applied  through 
experimental  observation  to  the  satisfaction  and  multiplication  of  concrete 
wants — that  is  doubtless  the  greatest  single  discovery  ever  imported  into  the 
life  of  man,  save  perhaps  the  discovery  of  language.  Science  has  made  the 
control  of  natural  forces  for  the  aims  of  life  so  inevitable  that  for  the  first  time 
man  is  relieved  from  overhanging  fear,  with  its  wolf-like  scramble  to  possess 
and  accumulate,  and  is  freed  to  consider  the  more  gracious  question  of  securing 
to  all  an  ample  and  liberal  life.1 

Science  has  made  the  “ experimental  or  applied  habit  of  mind” 
current  coin  in  the  realm  of  social  and  economic  values.  Through 
the  multiplication  of  human  wants  and  needs,  it  has  made  men  more  and 
more  dependent  upon  each  other,  and  has  thereby  stimulated  commerce 
with  its  socializing  and  civilizing  influences.  By  developing  an  elaborate 
system  of  methods  for  intercommunication  between  all  parts  of  the  world 
and  all  levels  of  culture  it  has  laid  the  foundation  for  a  type  of  social 
consciousness  which  may  well  be  expected  to  exercise  a  controlling 
influence  in  the  future  affairs  of  humanity.  And  finally,  by  increasing 
men’s  capacities  for  creating  and  conserving  values,  thereby  freeing 
them  from  a  bondage  to  dire  need  and  relentless  struggle  and  competition, 
it  has  placed  human  existence  upon  an  immeasurably  higher  level  where 
intelligence  and  foresight  and  co-operation  are  destined  to  reign 
supreme. 

1  Dewey,  The  Influence  of  Darwin  on  Philosophy ,  and  Other  Essays ,  p.  58. 


CHAPTER  V 


RELIGIOUS  KNOWLEDGE 

Now  the  reciprocal  character  of  the  tendencies  culminating  in  what 
we  have  described  as  the  socializing  of  religious  interests  and  ideals  and 
the  rationalizing  of  religious  methods,  is  itself  of  profound  religious  sig¬ 
nificance.  Its  immediate  import  is,  of  course,  as  we  have  seen,  with 
reference  to  the  distinctive  character  of  present-day  religious  problems 
and  values.  But  this  is  not  all.  In  addition  to  fixing  the  character  of 
these  problems  and  values  as  being  ethical  and  spiritual,  it  fixes  very 
definitely  the  status  of  religious  knowledge  and  truth.  We  have  seen 
that  all  knowledge  is  concerned  directly  or  indirectly  with  creating 
values.  It  follows  that  of  the  judgments  constituting  the  knowl¬ 
edge  process,  some  are  descriptive  judgments  and  some  are  judg¬ 
ments  of  practice,  but  that  both  of  these  are  essential  to  the  final 
purpose  of  all  knowledge,  namely,  the  creation  of  values.1  If,  now,  we 
bear  in  mind  that  this  reciprocity  between  the  component  factors  of 
knowledge,  namely,  evaluation  and  description,  is  actually  implicated  in 
the  problems  and  values  of  present-day  religion,  we  shall  be  in  a  position 
to  discount  some  of  the  more  or  less  popular  and  erroneous  notions  about 
the  essential  character  of  religious  knowledge.  More  particularly,  it 
must  appear  that  religious  knowledge  is  not  a  process  of  representing 
or  copying,  as  accurately  as  possible,  the  true  nature  of  religious  reality 
or  realities.  It  is  not  a  matter  of  scaling  the  abysmal  depths  of  doubt  in 
order  finally  to  establish  the  character  of  the  world  as  being  good  or 
rational.  It  is  not  a  method  for  getting  into  satisfactory  relations  in 
any  wholesale,  mechanical  fashion  with  the  “ powers  that  be,”  or  for 
appropriating,  once  for  all,  the  reality  of  a  religious  object.  It  is  not 
concerned  with  existences,  as  such,  at  all.  It  has  to  do  with  values  and 
meanings  in  terms  of  implied  future  consequences.  It  is  concerned  with 
already  existing  and  finished  values  only  as  data  in  a  process  of  realizing 
or  creating  new  values ;  that  is,  only  when  these  values  become  implicated 
in  a  problematic  situation  and  thereby  assume  cognitive  significance  or 
reference.  At  other  times  religious  realities  or  values  do  not  come  within 
the  scope  of  the  knowledge  process  at  all.  So  that  there  is  no  problem  of 
knowing  them  in  the  sense  in  which  such  a  problem  is  commonly  urged. 

1  Cf.  Dewey,  Essays  in  Experimental  Logic ,  chap.  xiv. 


29 


30 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


The  so-called  problem  of  religious  knowledge,  in  general,  is  an  aspect  of 
the  epistemological  predicament.  It  is  a  generalization  of  the  subject- 
object  relationship  which  emerges  at  moments  of  specific,  concrete  re¬ 
ligious  problems.  In  this  connection,  it  is  important  to  note  that  even  in 
the  case  of  the  philosophic  movements  centering  about  the  general  prob¬ 
lem  of  knowledge,  these  movements  had  their  occasions  within  the  limits 
of  concrete,  practical  situations,  when  social  values  were  being  weighed 
in  the  balance  and  found  wanting.1  The  reconstructions  effected  at 
such  times  of  moral  crisis,  together  with  the  methods  employed  therein, 
were  hypostasized — given  cosmic  significance.  The  reconstructed 
values  were  conceived  to  constitute  ultimate  reality  or  reality  in  general, 
and  the  dialectic  involved  in  the  process  of  reconstruction  was  thought  of 
as  conditioning  all  possible  contact  with  this  reality.  The  problem  of 
knowledge  then  became  the  problem  of  traversing  the  successive  steps 
in  this  dialectical  process.  But  we  have  seen  that  the  problems  of  reli¬ 
gion,  like  all  other  problems,  are  concrete  and  specific.  They  are  the 
problems  of  some  individual,  or  of  some  community,  or  of  some  nation, 
at  some  particular  time.  There  is  no  dialectical  process  for  solving  them 
all  at  once.  Any  philosophy  which  assumes  that  they  are  already  eter¬ 
nally  solved,  already  eternally  transcended  in  a  higher  and  better  order 
of  reality,  contributes  nothing  whatever  to  their  actual  solution.  The 
only  solution  of  religious  problems  that  can  satisfy  living,  striving,  suffer¬ 
ing  human  beings  is  one  which  involves  the  use  of  resources  and  energies 
co-ordinate  with  the  problems  themselves.  And  so  we  insist  that  reli¬ 
gious  knowledge  must  be  specific.  It  must  refer  to  particular  problems. 
It  must  involve  natural  factors.  It  must  be  a  matter  of  anticipating 
and  controlling  future  experience  by  reference  to  values  and  meanings 
experienced  in  the  past. 

Religious  knowledge,  then,  is  not  different  in  kind  from  any  other 
sort  of  knowledge.  It  is  instrumental  or  functional.  It  is  primarily 
concerned  with  creating  values.  To  this  end  it  employs  descriptive 
judgments  as  well  as  judgments  of  practice.  But  this  is  not  all.  If 
motif  and  technique,  end  and  means,  evaluation  and  description,  are 
truly  reciprocal,  the  formation  of  religious  motives  and  ends,  the  actual 
process  of  judging  religious  values,  must  itself  be  capable  of  scientific 
control. 

Now  the  possibility  of  a  scientific  control  of  judgments  of  religious 
value  would  seem  to  follow  from  what  we  have  said  as  to  the  con¬ 
tinuity  of  experience,  the  general  nature  and  function  of  knowledge,  and 

1  Moore,  Pragmatism  and  Its  Critics ,  pp.  31-33. 


RELIGIOUS  KNOWLEDGE 


31 


the  reciprocal  character  of  its  component  elements,  i.e.,  evaluation  and 
description.  Certain  objections,  however,  are  urged  against  the  propo¬ 
sition  that  religious  judgments  can  be  so  controlled.  For  example,  it  is 
said  that  any  attempt  to  determine  religious  values  by  scientific  pro¬ 
cedure  is  to  eliminate  from  these  values  all  that  makes  them  religious, 
and  indeed,  to  reduce  them  to  physical  or  mechanical  terms.  But  such 
an  objection  labors  under  a  too  narrow  interpretation  of  what  “scientific 
procedure  ”  means.  “  Scientific  ”  as  applied  to  a  process  of  investigation, 
does  not  refer  to  the  particular  form  or  type  of  the  results  obtained,  but 
rather  to  the  essentially  logical  character  of  the  technique  employed  in 
the  process.1  The  particular  form  of  the  results  of  any  scientific  inquiry 
will  depend  upon  the  character  of  the  subject  matter  with  which  the 
inquiry  is  concerned,  or  upon  the  specific  purpose  with  reference  to  which 
the  subject-matter  is  treated.  So  that  it  is  entirely  possible  to  employ 
scientific  procedure  in  an  inquiry  respecting  religious  values  without 
thereby  reducing  these  values  to  a  physical  or  mechanical  basis. 

A  more  typical  objection,  however,  to  our  contention  that  judgments 
of  religious  value  must  lend  themselves  to  scientific  control  is  that  scien¬ 
tific  control  of  judgments  is  possible  only  where  the  judgments  constitute 
statements  of  general  conditions  which,  although  they  are  capable  of 
complete  logical  determination,  are,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  hypothetical 
and  therefore  contain  no  reference  to  individual  acts;  and  that  reli¬ 
gious  judgments,  since  they  do  refer  to  individual  acts  and  are  therefore 
categorical  rather  than  hypothetical  in  character,  will  not  lend  themselves 
to  such  control,  but  must  find  their  source  and  sanction  in  some  tran¬ 
scendental  faculty  such  as  intuition  or  conscience.2  But  the  assumption 
implied  in  this  objection  cannot  be  sustained.  It  is  not  true,  in  the  first 
place,  that  scientific  judgments  are  concerned  wholly,  or  even  primarily, 
with  general  or  universal  propositions  in  and  for  themselves.  On  the 
contrary,  they  are  always  made  in  the  interest  of,  or  with  reference  to, 
individual  judgments  of  practice. 

The  scientific  judgment,  the  formulation  of  a  connection  of  conditions, 
has  its  origin  in  and  is  developed  for  the  specific  and  sole  purpose  of  freeing  and 
reinforcing  acts  of  judgments  that  apply  to  unique  and  individual  cases.3 

That  is  to  say,  there  is  nothing  about  religious  judgments,  in  the  way  of 
specific,  practical  reference,  which  does  not  also  characterize  scientific 
judgments.  Furthermore,  it  is  not  true  that  religious  judgments  would 

1  Dewey,  “The  Logical  Conditions  of  a  Scientific  Treatment  of  Morality,” 
Decennial  Publications  of  the  University  of  Chicago ,  III,  116. 

3  Ibid.  3  Ibid.,  p.  118. 


32 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


lose  their  distinctively  religious  character  by  thus  being  assimilated  to 
the  type  of  logical  treatment  accorded  to  judgments  of  science.  For, 
as  we  have  seen,  judgments  of  science  have  precisely  those  logical  features 
in  the  way  of  specific,  practical  reference  that  characterize  religious 
judgments.  So  that  the  scientific  control  of  the  latter  type  of  judgments 
would  simply  be  a  matter  of  taking  advantage  of  possibilities  of  logical 
treatment  already  employed  in  the  control  of  a  fundamentally  similar 
type  of  judgment. 

But  assuming  the  possibility  of  scientific  control  of  religious  judg¬ 
ments,  what  are  the  conditions  of  such  control  ?  How  is  it  to  be  effected  ? 
It  is  obvious,  in  the  first  place,  that  a  scientific  control  of  any  sort  of 
judgment  requires  a  set  of  limiting  terms  or  ultimate  intellectual  stand¬ 
points,  such  as  the  general  concepts  or  categories  which  operate  in  the 
several  sciences  and  serve  as  instruments  or  tools  in  particular  acts  of 
judgments.1  If  religious  judgments  are  to  lend  themselves  to  scientific 
control,  such  a  set  of  limiting  terms  or  ultimate  intellectual  stand¬ 
points,  appropriate  to  the  particular  subject-matter  with  which  these 
judgments  are  concerned,  and  to  the  specific  purpose  with  reference  to 
which  the  subject-matter  is  judged,  must  be  available.  And,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  there  are  such  religious  concepts  or  categories  at  hand.  When  we 
speak  of  faith,  or  freedom,  or  goodness,  or  God,  we  mean  to  give  expres¬ 
sion,  however  vaguely  and  ambiguously,  to  certain  standpoints  and 
standards  felt  to  be  authoritative  in  religious  experience.  And  if  the 
content  of  these  terms  is  not  as  specific  as  the  content  embodied  in  the 
categories  of  the  physical  or  biological  sciences,  if  the  terms  themselves 
do  not  operate  as  readily  and  as  precisely  as  scientific  categories  operate, 
this  is  not  because  they  have  had  any  other  than  an  empirical  origin  or 
can  have  any  other  than  a  functional  significance.  Their  content  is 
indefinite  and  their  operation  is  uncertain  because  their  empirical  and 
functional  character  is  not  generally  recognized.  They  are  thought  of 
as  having  their  origin  and  sanction  in  transcendental  sources.  So  that 
at  times  of  moral  decision,  in  situations  requiring  religious  insight  and 
judgment,  they  are  employed  without  conscious  reference  to  the  fact 
that  they  are  functions  within  a  process,  and  that  they  are  to  be  checked 
up  and  modified  by  the  exigencies  of  that  process.  The  result  is  that 
religious  experience  is  capricious  and  unstable.  It  is  determined  from 
without,  in  an  external  and  mechanical  fashion.  It  is  made  to  depend 
upon  supernatural  power  and  direction.  Its  values  are  donations  vouch¬ 
safed  by  a  divine  grace.  Prosperous  changes  and  events  are  of  the  nature 

1  Dewey,  op.  tit.,  p.  129. 


RELIGIOUS  KNOWLEDGE 


33 


of  miracles,  the  conditions  of  whose  occurrence  are  not  subject  to  human 
control.  That  they  have  occurred  once  is  no  guarantee  that  they  can 
be  made  to  persist,  or  that  they  can  be  made  the  bases  for  inducing  other 
prosperous  and  beneficent  changes.  It  is  small  wonder  that  the  decisions 
and  judgments  by  which  religious  experience  is  actually  constructed  and 
sustained  are  said  to  be  subjective  or  unreal.  They  are  subject  to  no 
general  conditions  of  control.  They  are  discontinuous  and  unconnected ; 
each  is  a  law  unto  itself.  Therefore  they  have  little  or  no  objective 
significance  or  validity.  What  is  required  to  give  them  objectivity  and 
thus  to  render  religious  experience  stable  and  coherent  is  an  insight  into 
the  empirical  and  functional  character  of  the  standpoints  and -stand¬ 
ards  with  reference  to  which  they  are  formed.  It  must  be  recognized 
that  these  general  concepts  or  categories,  since  they  are  empirical  and 
functional,  are  subject  to  constant  change  and  modification,  and  that 
they  must  be  constantly  criticized  and  reinterpreted  in  the  light  of  new 
conditions  and  needs.  And  this  recognition  must  become  articulate  in 
a  systematic  attempt  at  such  criticism  and  reinterpretation.  There  must 
be  a  “  logic  of  conduct,  ”  a  science  of  the  meaning  and  value  of  fundamen¬ 
tal  religious  ideas.  It  is  obvious  that  a  historical-scientific  treatment 
of  such  general  ideas  as  knowledge,  faith,  freedom,  salvation,  the  divine, 
etc.,  would  give  to  these  ideas  new  content,  endow  them  new  working 
value,  and  thus  make  them  potent  instruments  in  the  process  of  organiz¬ 
ing  and  expanding  experience. 

But  clearly  defined  categories  are  not  sufficient  for  a  scientific  control 
of  religious  judgments.  In  addition  to  these,  there  must  be  formulated 
a  set  of  statements  regarding  the  general  conditions  and  relations  obtain¬ 
ing  in  the  subject-matter  to  be  judged.1  Now  the  subject-matter  of 
religious  judgments,  like  that  of  all  judgments  of  practice,  includes  as 
one  of  its  elements  the  motive,  or  attitude,  or  disposition,  of  the  judger. 
That  is  to  say,  in  judging  that  this  or  that  is  good,  or  ought  to  be  done, 
the  judger  is  in  reality  judging  his  own  character;  he  is  putting  himself 
on  record,  as  being,  at  the  moment  of  his  judgment,  of  some  particular 
disposition  rather  than  of  some  other. 

The  judger  (in  an  ethical  judgment)  is  engaged  in  judging  himself;  and 
thereby  in  so  far  is  fixing  the  conditions  of  all  further  judgments  of  all  further 
types  whatsoever.  Put  in  more  psychological  terms,  we  may  say  that  the 
judgment  realizes,  through  conscious  deliberation  and  choice,  a  certain  motive 
heretofore  vague  and  impulsive;  or  it  expresses  a  habit  in  such  a  way  as  not 
merely  to  strengthen  it  practically,  but  as  to  bring  to  consciousness  both  its 
emotional  worth  and  its  significance  in  terms  of  certain  kinds  of  consequences.2 

2  Ibid.,  p.  128. 


1  Ibid.,  p.  13 1. 


34 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


But  if  the  subject-matter  to  be  judged  is  constituted  in  part  by 
motives  or  dispositions,  as  the  momentary  expressions  of  the  character 
of  the  judger,  it  follows  that  any  attempt  to  formulate  a  connection  of 
the  conditions  and  relations  obtaining  in  the  subject-matter  must  have  as 
a  part  of  its  task  a  thorough  psychological  analysis  of  the  processes 
implicated  in  choice  or  judgment.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  these 
processes  are  as  definite  as  the  series  of  events  conditioning  some  occur¬ 
rence  in  the  physical  world  if  only  we  knew  what  they  are.  And 
precisely  what  they  are  must  be  made  the  subject  of  psychological 
analyses.  They  must  be  made  objective.  It  must  be  determined  what 
psychical  conditions  are  implicated  in  a  given  motive  or  attitude,  and 
what  the  relations  of  these  are  to  the  motive  or  attitude  and  to  one 
another.  It  must  be  possible  to  single  out  those  conditions  which  are 
connected  with  the  judgment  in  a  logically  necessary  way,  and  those 
which  are  connected  with  it  in  a  merely  incidental  or  superficial  way. 
This  will  make  it  possible  to  treat  the  subjective  element  in  judgments 
of  practice  objectively.  It  will  lay  the  foundations  for  the  sort  of  con¬ 
trol  to  which  religious  judgments  must  lend  themselves  if  they  are  to 
have  objective  significance  and  validity. 

But  the  subject-matter  of  religious  judgments  is  much  more  compre¬ 
hensive  than  that  which  is  constituted  by  the  motives,  dispositions,  and 
the  like,  of  the  individual  who  is  judging.  We  have  said  that  religious 
judgments  are  concerned  with  creating  religious  values  and  that  these 
values  consist,  for  the  most  part,  of  certain  prosperous  and  beneficent 
types  of  social  organization  and  economic  control.  It  is  obvious,  there¬ 
fore,  that  the  attempt  to  furnish  the  general  conditions  of  a  scientific 
control  of  religious  judgments  must  likewise  include  as  a  part  of  its  task 
an  analysis  of  these  social  and  economic  institutions  which  may  enter 
into  the  process  of  reconstructing  and  expanding  religious  values. 

For  the  purposes  of  such  an  analysis,  advantage  must  be  taken  of 
all  types  of  scientific  investigations  whatsoever  which  tend  to  establish 
in  objective  form  the  connections  of  conditions  obtaining  in  social  situ¬ 
ations.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  scientific  control  of  religious 
judgments,  there  is  no  hard  and  fast  distinction  between  the  analyses 
effected  by  the  social  sciences  and  those  effected  by  the  physical  or  bio¬ 
logical  sciences.  All  sorts  of  physical  and  biological  factors  are  impli¬ 
cated  in  the  social  and  moral  betterment  of  any  community.  These 
implications  must  be  made  objective;  they  must  be  articulated  in  a 
system  of  connections.  There  is  no  question  here  of  “  mechanizing  ” 
religious  values  or  of  reducing  them  to  a  physical  basis.  Whatever 


RELIGIOUS  KNOWLEDGE 


35 


statements  are  effected  concerning  the  connections  of  conditions  obtain¬ 
ing  within  the  subject-matter  of  judgments  of  religious  value  have  the 
same  import  as  is  contained  in  all  scientific  “universals,  ”  namely,  that 
of  releasing  and  reinforcing  individual  acts  of  judgments.  So  far  from 
implying  the  reduction  of  religious  values  to  a  physical  or  mechanical 
basis,  the  possibility  of  a  scientific  control  of  religious  judgments  implies 
that  there  is  such  a  continuity  within  the  several  areas  of  experience 
as  makes  it  possible  to  utilize  the  statements  effected  with  reference  to 
conditions  obtaining  in  one  area  of  experience  in  effecting  statements  of 
conditions  obtaining  in  another  area,  without  thereby  reducing  the  one  • 
kind  of  experience  to  the  other.  Hence  the  task  of  establishing  universal 
connections  of  conditions  within  the  subject-matter  of  religious  judg¬ 
ments  may  include  as  many  types  of  analysis  as  are  necessary  to  make 
these  universals  thoroughly  objective.  And,  indeed,  nothing  short  of 
this  will  render  the  scientific  control  of  religious  judgments  possible. 


i 


CHAPTER  VI 


RELIGION  AND  THEOLOGY 

The  discussion  of  religious  knowledge  contained  in  the  preceding 
chapter  hinted  at  the  possibility  and  the  necessity  of  an  empirical  and 
experimental  theology.  Now  the  idea  of  a  theology  that  will  be  at 
once  empirical  and  experimental  is  common  enough  in  philosophical 
circles.  But  the  idea  has  not  been  sufficiently  emphasized  or  ade¬ 
quately  developed.  The  present  chapter  will  be  devoted  to  these 
ends.  An  effort  will  be  made  to  indicate  in  a  very  general  way  the 
program  to  be  pursued  and  the  methodology  to  be  employed  by  such 
an  empirical  and  experimental  study  and  to  justify  the  use  of  the  term 
“ theology”  in  connection  with  a  science  thus  defined. 

To  begin  with,  it  will  be  important  to  bear  in  mind  the  commonly 
recognized  distinction  between  theology  and  religion.  The  religious 
mode  of  experiencing  is  primarily  appreciative.  Only  during  excep¬ 
tional  periods  and  in  the  experience  of  exceptional  peoples  does  it 
become  reflective  and  deliberately  set  about  to  make  itself  intelligible. 
Ordinarily  it  is  an  immediate  sense  or  a  direct  appreciation  of  life’s 
high  values  which  passes  over  into  habits,  dispositions,  and  character 
appropriate  thereto.  Sometimes  the  habits,  dispositions,  and  character 
thus  formed  and  relied  upon  as  being  appropriate  to  religious  interests 
turn  out  to  be  inappropriate  and  inadequate.  At  such  times,  religion 
is  thrown  back  upon  itself;  it  becomes  reflective.  It  is  confronted 
with  the  problem  of  the  character  of  the  divine  and  of  the  attitudes 
and  activities  appropriate  to  a  fruitful  contact  with  it.  The  articula¬ 
tion  and  solution  of  this  problem  is  what  we  mean  by  “ theology.” 
Theology,  then,  is  not  to  be  confused  with  religion;  it  is  the  result  of 
religion’s  effort  to  explain  itself  for  purposes  of  control.  It  is  thus  a 
science.  But  as  a  science,  it  has  been  rendered  more  or  less  unique 
by  the  circumstance  that  its  method  as  well  as  its  motive  was  furnished 
by  religion.  That  is  to  say,  theology  was  precluded  by  the  peculiar 
sanctity  attaching  to  its  subject-matter  from  adopting  and  developing 
empirical  and  experimental  methods.  Like  other  sciences,  it  was 
“born  in  partiality,”  but  unlike  other  sciences,  it  failed  to  achieve  that 
degree  of  detached  impartiality  that  is  the  prime  condition  of  fruitful 
methods  in  any  science.  This  of  course  accounts  for  its  traditionally 

36 


RELIGION  AND  THEOLOGY 


37 


dogmatic  and  non-empirical  character.  It  also  serves  to  indicate  the 
true  nature  of  the  so-called  conflict  between  religion  and  science.  This 
conflict  has  in  reality  involved,  not  religion  and  science  in  general, 
but  certain  of  the  natural  sciences  and  the  science  of  theology.  It 
arose  out  of  the  fact  that  at  first  both  the  natural  sciences  and  theology 
were  dominated  by  metaphysical  points  of  view.  Neither  had  as  yet 
learned  to  regard  its  explanations  as  instruments  of  control.  The 
analyses  and  generalizations  made  by  each  were  supposed  to  be  ontologi- 
cally  exhaustive  and  exclusive.  And  as  the  points  of  view  from  which 
these  respective  analyses  and  generalizations  were  made  represented  ' 
empirically  distinct  types  of  interest,  they  came  to  be  regarded  as  meta¬ 
physically  incompatible,  and  gave  rise  to  a  conflict  which  continued  to 
scandalize  our  modern  life  even  after  the  natural  sciences  became 
positivistic  and  pragmatic.  For  theology  has  persisted  in  holding  itself 
out  as  a  metaphysic  and,  in  that  role,  has  continued  to  discount  the 
investigations  and  deliverances  of  the  natural  sciences. 

But  the  metaphysical  pretensions  of  theology  are  without  any  theo- 
Tetical  or  practical  warrant.  For,  in  the  first  place,  it  is  not  essential 
to  the  religious  mode  of  experiencing  to  regard  it  as  a  reaction  to  the 
world  as  a  whole  as  being  rational  or  moral.  Whenever  religion  has 
conceived  its  own  attitude  in  terms  of  such  a  wholesale  reaction  to  the 
world,  it  has  done  so  under  the  stress  of  demands  made  upon  it  by 
some  absolutistic  type  of  philosophy.  Left  to  work  out  its  own  atti¬ 
tudes  and  activities,  it  has  been  concerned  with  the  realization,  preser¬ 
vation,  and  promotion  of  concrete  human  values.  Furthermore,  it 
is  not  essential  to  the  reality  of  the  religious  mode  of  experiencing  to 
demonstrate  its  ontological  status  by  any  sort  of  dialectical  proofs  or 
apologetics.  Religious  realities  are  their  own  best,  and  only,  evidence. 
There  is,  then,  no  occasion  for  vouching  for  or  for  vindicating  their 
ontological  integrity.  There  is  of  course  a  need  of  defining  their  empiri¬ 
cal  character  and  of  exhibiting  their  practical  value.  But  this  is 
quite  a  different  matter.  It  does  not  imply  a  metaphysical  point  of 
departure,  nor  does  it  involve  the  use  of  dialectical  methods. 

Theology  must  forego  its  erstwhile  metaphysical  pretensions,  but 
it  may,  however,  take  a  new  lease  of  life  by  adopting  once  for  all  an 
empirical  point  of  view  and  developing  experimental  methods.  Thus 
will  it  become  a  science  in  the  sense  which  first  defined  its  purpose  and 
its  task.  It  will  assume  the  reality  of  its  subject-matter,  take  for 
granted  the  existence  of  the  divine,  precisely  as  physics  and  chemistry 
assume  the  existence  of  matter,  or  biology  the  existence  of  living 


38 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


organisms.  If  such  an  assumption  appears  to  be  somewhat  bold  in  view 
of  the  unintelligible  character  of  what  we  mean  to  imply  by  the  divine, 
this  but  shows  the  greater  need  of  an  empirical  and  experimental  treat¬ 
ment  of  religious  realities  such  as  we  are  urging.  It  is  small  wonder 
that  the  content  of  the  divine  is  vague;  the  sort  of  intellectual  treat¬ 
ment  accorded  it  by  the  methods  of  theology  has  not  been  calculated 
to  bestow  upon  it  any  great  signification  in  the  way  of  practical,  con¬ 
crete  meaning.  And  even  so,  the  case  is  no  worse  with  theology  than 
with  natural  philosophy  in  its  prescientific  stage;  the  scholastic  con¬ 
ception  of  substance  or  matter  was  scarcely  more  intelligible  than  the 
traditional  conception  of  the  divine.  But  when  theology  acts  on  the 
positivistic  cue  furnished  by  the  natural  sciences;  when  it  leaves  off  fol¬ 
lowing  the  will-o’-the-wisp  of  “design”  and  “special  creation”  and  “provi¬ 
dence”  and  “attributes”;  when  it  assumes  once  for  all  the  reality  of  its 
subject-matter  as  embodied  in  practical,  concrete  experience  and  con¬ 
cerns  itself  with  constructing  such  a  set  of  intellectual  statements 
about  this  subject-matter  as  will  facilitate  its  control,  we  may  expect 
the  content  of  the  divine  to  begin  to  assume  an  empirical  and  practical 
character  approaching  in  definiteness  and  fruitfulness  the  great  concep¬ 
tions  wrought  out  by  the  physical  and  biological  sciences. 

The  program  which  is  here  contemplated  for  the  new  theology, 
then,  would  amount  to  nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  definition  of 
fundamental  social  values,  and  the  methodology  to  be  employed  would 
of  course  develop  in  accordance  with  empirical  and  experimental  canons. 
This  would  involve,  in  the  first  place,  a  criticism  of  traditional  and 
contemporary  standards  of  value  in  the  bearing  that  these  have  on  the 
several  areas  of  social  practice.  And  such  a  criticism  would,  in  turn, 
lead  up  to  the  construction,  under  carefully  worked  out  conditions  of 
control,  of  new  standards  of  value  such  as  might  be  shown  to  be 
demanded  for  the  present  time. 

Now  an  objection  will  undoubtedly  be  urged  to  the  use  of  the  term 
theology  to  distinguish  such  a  science  of  social  values.  The  position 
taken  in  this  study  is  that  there  is  no  impropriety  in  such  a  usage. 
In  support  of  this  contention,  it  is  to  be  noted,  in  the  first  place,  that 
the  particular  concepts  in  which  religious  values  have  been  embodied 
at  the  several  levels  of  culture  where  the  God-idea  has  appeared  are 
not  to  be  thought  of  as  so  many  efforts  to  cognize  one  eternal  divine 
object,  transcending  experience,  but  must  be  regarded  as  instruments 
for  mediating  and  controlling  experience.  A  give)n  idea  of  the  divine 
owes  its  content,  then,  not  to  any  transcendent  object  to  which  it  is 


RELIGION  AND  THEOLOGY 


39 


supposed  to  refer  by  way  of  representation,  but  to  the  social  context 
in  which  it  functions.  That  certain  traits  or  features  have  persisted 
in  the  evolution  of  the  concept  of  the  divine  and  have,  indeed,  fixed 
the  main  outlines  of  the  mediaeval  and  modern  God,  but  points  to  the 
tremendous  importance  of  the  historical  conditions  which  gave  this 
idea  of  the  divine  its  setting;  it  does  not  at  all  determine  the  content 
of  future  conceptions  of  the  divine,  nor  does  it  commit  theology  once 
for  all  to  the  consideration  of  the  traditional  God  as  its  subject-matter, 
or  to  the  use  of  methods  appropriate  thereto.  It  was  an  accident  that 
the  science  of  theology  arose  at  a  time  when  men’s  ideas  of  the  divine 
centered  in  the  supernatural.  Or,  if  it  is  better  to  say  that  theology 
arose  because  of  a  disintegration  of  human  \values  and  the  subsequent 
transfer  of  men’s  interests  and  hopes  to  the  superhuman,  at  least  it 
may  be  said  that  the  problem  articulated  bji'  theology  and  the  methods 
employed  by  it  were  determined  by  this  dualism  between  the  natural 
and  the  supernatural,  the  human  and  the  divine.  And  this  dualism 
was  itself  the  accident  of  certain  obvious  social  conditions.  There 
was  a  breaking  down  of  human  values  and  standards  with  no  methods 
at  hand  for  effecting  a  reconstruction  of  these  at  the  level  of  social 
practice.  So  that  it  comes  to  the  same  thing:  theology  is  not  to  be 
committed  forever  to  the  consideration  of  a  subject-matter  or  to  the 
use  of  methods  whose  content  and  character  were  incidental  to  social 
conditions  long  since  left  behind. 

Again,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  the  history  of  the  sciences  affords 
ample  warrant  for  the  use  of  the  term  theology  in  connection  with  a 
science  of  social  values.  The  history  of  psychology  is  the  most  notable 
case  in  point.  And  here  again  we  have  an  instance  of  the  sort  of  thing 
noted  in  connection  with  the  beginnings  of  theology:  a  dualism  reflect¬ 
ing  social  conditions  of  the  time  fixes  the  content  of  the  subject-matter 
and  the  character  of  the  methods  of  the  science.  The  soul  was  regarded 
as  immaterial  entity,  which  of  course  was  not  to  be  apprehended 
through  the  medium  of  ordinary  experience.  The  consideration  of  this 
immaterial  soul  through  non-empirical  methods  was  known  as  rational 
psychology.  In  time  the  immaterial  soul  gave  way  to  mental  faculties 
as  the  subject-matter  of  psychology;  and  mental  faculties  in  turn 
gave  way  to  states  of  consciousness;  and  states  of  consciousness  to 
behavior,  until  now  we  have  a  psychology  as  different  from  the  rational 
psychology  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries  as  the  sort  of 
theology  contemplated  by  this  discussion  differs  from  the  dogmatic 
and  speculative  theology  of  earlier  times. 


40 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


Just  what  the  content  of  the  new  theology’s  conceptions  of  the 
divine  will  turn  out  to  be  is  of  course  a  matter  to  be  settled  by  present- 
day  experience.  The  writer  has  no  theological  axes  to  grind  nor  any 
preconceived  notions  of  the  divine  to  defend.  The  point  to  be  made 
is  that  there  is  no  a  priori  reason  why  theology  should  not  now  concern 
itself  with  problems  and  conceive  its  subject-matter  in  terms  other 
than  those  which  have  to  do  with  the  traditional  God.  To  be  sure 
it  would  be  a  part  of  the  task  of  the  new  theology  to  work  out  some 
way  or  ways  of  conceiving  God  which  would  render  this  conception  of 
the  divine  a  more  effective  instrument  of  social  control.  But  it  goes 
without  saying  that  any  conception  thus  worked  out  would  not  be 
exhaustive  or  exclusive.  It  must  also  be  plain  that  the  task  just 
referred  to,  namely,  the  definition  of  God,  would  not  comprise  the  entire 
task  of  theology.  Theology  is  to  be  a  science  of  the  divine;  but  the 
divine  as  the  subject-matter  of  theology  will  have  a  broader  connota¬ 
tion  than  is  contained  in  the  notion  of  God.  Only  an  absolutistic 
philosophy  can  restrict  the  concern  of  theology  to  that  of  God.  And 
it  can  do  this  only  by  articulating  an  ultimate  aim  for  all  the  sciences, 
or  for  science  in  general,  and  by  so  defining  this  aim  as  to  exclude  from 
it  any  concern  for  the  concrete  problems  of  practical  life. 

But  it  may  be  said  that  however  appropriate  the  term  theology  is 
to  a  science  whose  task  it  is  to  define  fundamental  social  values,  there 
is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no  need  for  such  a  science,  inasmuch  as  the  task 
assigned  to  it  is  already  receiving  full  recognition  and  adequate  treat¬ 
ment  at  the  hands  of  one  of  the  oldest  and  best  established  of  the  philo¬ 
sophical  sciences,  namely,  ethics.  It  must  be  admitted  that  the  task 
of  theology  as  it  is  here  conceived  will  be  identical  in  important  respects 
with  that  of  ethics.  Certainly  no  hard  and  fast  distinction  can  be  made 
between  the  two.  And  yet  traditional  ethics  has  suffered  from  certain 
defects  or  limitations  which  have  precluded  its  preforming  in  an 
adequate  manner  the  task  here  assigned  to  theology.  For  one  thing, 
its  interests  and  methods  have  been  so  largely  historical  and  contro¬ 
versial  as  to  leave  little  or  no  opportunity  for  the  treatment  of  issues 
and  problems  presented  in  the  actual  life  of  the  times.  And  even  where 
such  a  treatment  has  been  attempted  the  problems  involved  have  been 
conceived  and  stated  in  too  great  isolation  from  the  specific  context 
in  which  they  appear.  Or,  in  the  absence  of  these  defects,  another  one, 
equally  grave,  has  been  present  to  vitiate  the  services  rendered  by  ethi¬ 
cal  studies;  these  studies  have  been  marked  by  too  little  of  the  imagi¬ 
native  and  constructive  experimentation  that  has  proved  so  fruitful 


RELIGION  AND  THEOLOGY 


4i 


in  other  fields  of  scientific  endeavor.  Their  point  of  view  and  method 
have  been  too  formal.  They  have  been  too  much  occupied  with  trying 
to  square  our  present  experience  with  old  standpoints  and  standards 
and  too  little  concerned  with  constructing  new  standpoints  and  stand¬ 
ards  for  mediating  a  larger  and  richer  experience. 

It  must  be  said  there  is  considerable  work  being  done  in  ethics  to 
which  the  above  criticisms  do  not  at  all  apply.  There  are  a  number 
of  ethicists  who  have  frankly  adopted  a  biological  and  social  point  of 
view  and  are  making  of  ethics  an  experimental  science  in  the  truest 
sense  of  the  word.  Between  the  program  being  pursued  by  such 
thinkers  and  writers  and  the  task  here  assigned  to  theology  no  distinc¬ 
tion  whatever  can  be  made.  It  would  seem,  however,  that  the  motive 
actuating  the  new  ethics  and  the  method  being  employed  by  it  are  so 
important  as  to  mark  it  off  once  for  all  from  ethics  of  the  traditional 
types.  And  it  would  seem  that  the  development  of  an  empirical  and 
experimental  theology  would  afford  a  practicable  means  for  effecting 
this  distinction  or  separation. 

But  whether  the  new  ethics  is  assimilated  to  the  new  theology  or 
the  two  sciences  find  it  advantageous  to  develop  side  by  side,  there  are 
other  considerations  of  a  more  practical  nature  which  demand  an 
independent  science  of  theology  such  as  is  here  suggested.  These 
considerations  have  to  do  with  the  utilization  of  all  the  physical  and 
moral  resources  represented  by  institutions  of  religious  culture  and 
inspiration  for  purpose  of  scientific  control  in  religious  experience. 
Such  considerations  do  not  of  course  constitute  a  ground  for  any  ulti¬ 
mate  distinction  between  ethics  and  theology.  They  are  incidental 
to  social  conditions  and  arrangements  which  have  their  roots  in  a 
more  or  less  remote  past.  The  church,  the  Bible  school,  the  theological 
seminary  of  the  future,  must  no  doubt  undergo  radical  changes  both 
as  to  structure  and  as  to  function.  But  for  all  that,  they  are  at  the 
present  time  the  controlling  factors  in  determining  the  content  or  qual¬ 
ity  of  religious  experience.  They  are  the  media  through  which  the 
new  theory  of  values  is  to  be  assimilated  to  religious  practice.  And 
this  process  of  assimilation  will  be  facilitated  by  a  reconstruction  of 
traditional  theology.  Much  of  the  best  work  being  done  in  the  criti¬ 
cism  and  construction  of  social  values  is  ineffective  because  its  benefits 
are  not  available  to  the  rank  and  file  of  the  people.  This  circumstance 
must  be  overcome  if  the  new  theory  of  values  is  to  adequately  affect 
social  practice.  The  institutions  of  conventional  religion  must  be 
enlisted  in  behalf  of  the  social  and  scientific  point  of  view  in  religious 


42 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


reconstruction.  The  physical  and  moral  resources  of  the  church  must 
be  utilized.  The  “higher  criticism”  of  religious  documents,  the  “modern” 
point  of  view  in  theology,  the  “progressive”  movement  in  church  organ¬ 
ization  and  activity  are  all  means  to  this  end.  With  all  the  hostility 
aroused  and  opposition  encountered  by  these  tendencies,  they  give 
promise  of  larger  and  more  immediate  results  than  can  be  looked  for 
from  a  science  of  ethics  whose  traditional  status  as  a  philosophical 
discipline  renders  its  investigations  and  deliverances  more  or  less  inac¬ 
cessible  to  religious  practice.  But  these  tendencies  must  go  the  whole 
length.  They  must  look  toward  and  culminate  in  a  reconstruction  of 
theology. 


x 


CHAPTER  VII 


GOD1 

Our  problem  in  the  present  chapter  is  to  work  out  a  definition  of 
God.  But  first  we  must  reiterate  what  was  said  at  the  beginning  of 
chapter  iii  with  reference  to  the  point  of  view  from  which  we  are 
concerned  to  treat  religious  realities.  We  are  concerned  with  religious 
realities,  we  said,  primarily  as  being  implicated  in  certain  social  and 
ethical  problems.  The  purposes  of  our  study  require  that  we  shall  so 
analyze  religious  realities,  that  is,  formulate  such  a  set  of  intellectual 
statements  about  religious  meanings  and  values1,  as  to  constitute  a 
basis  for  the  solution  of  religious  problems  and  for  the  control  of  reli¬ 
gious  experience.  This  point  of  view  is  fundamental  to  what  we  shall 
have  to  say  as  to  the  existence  and  character  of  God.  All  the  while 
we  shall  be  thinking  in  terms  of  the  problematic  situation  and  with  a 
view  to  the  possibility  of  scientific  control.  We  shall  not  be  concerned 
to  catalogue  the  various  historical  significations  that  have  attached  to 
the  God-idea;  nor  shall  we  utilize  such  historical  data  as  are  essential 
to  the  demands  of  our  study  as  a  basis  for  constructing  any  sort  of 
metaphysic  of  the  divine.  Again,  we  shall  not  be  concerned  to  estimate 
the  relative  truth  or  validity  of  the  several  historical  conceptions  of 
God.  We  shall  rather  aim  at  effecting  such  a  reinterpretation  of  the 
divine  as  will  render  it  a  meaningful  concept  in  the  light  of  present 
psychological  conditions. 

Pursuant  to  this  aim,  we  take  as  our  point  of  departure  a  fact  on 
which  we  have  already  dwelt,  namely,  that  in  the  present  democratic 
and  scientific  movements  we  have  the  foundations  for  a  new  type  of 
social  organization,  which  is  destined  to  be  the  determining  factor  in 
future  conceptions  of  the  divine.  We  have  said  that  at  every  level  of 
culture  the  God-idea,  where  it  is  present  at  all,  is  the  ideal  embodiment 
of  the  highest  social  values  peculiar  to  that  level  and  reflects  social 
attitudes  and  activities  appropriate  to  the  realization  and  maintenence 
of  those  values.  We  have  also  said  that  the  highest  social  values  have 

1  Certain  sections  of  the  material  included  in  this  chapter  appeared  in  an  article 
in  the  International  Journal  of  Ethics ,  Vol.  XXIX  (October,  1918),  under  the  title 
“Religious  Worship  and  Social  Control,”  and  are  reproduced  here  with  the  consent  of 
that  Journal. 


43 


44 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


usually  assumed  the  form  of  certain  prosperous  and  beneficent  types 
of  social  organization.  What  we  have  now  to  point  out  is  that  the 
evolution  of  the  God-idea  has  gone  hand  in  hand  with  the  development 
or  expansion  of  methods  of  organizing  and  controlling  life  in  social 
groups.  It  will  be  convenient  to  conceive  of  this  process  of  social  and 
political  development  with  the  corresponding  development  of  the  con¬ 
cept  of  the  divine  as  exhibiting  three  general  stages.  The  first  stage 
may  be  said  to  begin  with  the  earliest  Hebrew  notions  of  Yahweh  as  a 
tribal  god  and  to  continue  until  the  rise  of  democracy  among  European 
peoples  in  the  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  In  this  stage  the 
most  characteristic  conception  of  God  or  the  divine  was  that  of  a  mighty 
monarch  ruling  and  protecting  his  people.1  At  a  time  when  one  social 
group  was  constantly  subjected  to  the  trickery  and  treachery  of  hostile 
groups,  social  life  was  best  preserved  and  promoted  by  patriarchal  and 
monarchal  forms  of  government.  The  patriarch  or  king,  as  the  case 
might  be,  was  the  actual  embodiment  of  the  highest  social  values. 
It  was  natural,  then,  that  the  social  consciousness  of  the  group,  the 
consciousness  arising  from  pursuing  common  interests,  from  meeting 
common  difficulties,  and  from  achieving  common  values,  should  em¬ 
body  itself  in  some  analogous  form. 

With  the  rise  of  democracy,  there  was  a  change  in  the  imagery 
employed  in  conceiving  God.  He  was  no  longer  thought  of  solely  in 
terms  of  sovereignty  and  protection;  he  came  to  be  conceived  in  terms 
of  fatherhood.2  He  was  the  father  of  all  men  and  all  men  were  brothers. 
And  this  tendency  to  conceive  God  in  terms  of  a  father  who  was  to 
be  trusted  and  obeyed  betrays  the  metaphysical  presuppositions  of  the 
new  democratic  ideals.  These  ideals  were  rooted  in  an  a  priori  theory 
of  natural  rights.  The  rights  of  man  on  the  basis  of  which  it  was  pro¬ 
posed  to  construct  all  possible  forms  of  government  were  deduced  from 
what  was  conceived  to  have  been  man’s  natural  state  before  he  was 
brought  under  the  authority  of  social  and  political  institutions.  That 
is  to  say,  these  rights  were  given;  they  were  donations  to  man  from  an 
inherent  and  inalienable  humanity.  Man  was  as  dependent  as  ever. 
He  had  achieved  no  rights,  and  could  claim  no  rights  except  in  the  name 
of  his  innate  humanity.  And  these  natural  rights  were  given  once 

1  The  notion  of  kinship  was,  of  course,  also  present  as  an  element  in  primitive 
conceptions  of  God. 

2  Jesus’  conception  of  God  as  father  was  projected  into  a  social  context  which 
rendered  it  for  the  most  part  unintelligible  and  sterile  until  the  rise  of  humanitarian 
sentiments  and  democratic  institutions. 


GOD 


45 


for  all.  Men  might  come  and  men  might  go,  but  their  rights  went  on 
forever.  Nothing  could  change  them;  nothing  could  happen  to  give 
them  new  content  or  meaning.  It  is  not  to  be  wondered  that  a  type 
of  democracy  based  on  such  a  conception  of  man  and  his  metaphysi¬ 
cally  fixed  and  finished  nature  proved  inadequate  to  meet  the  demands 
made  upon  it  by  the  expanding  life  of  subsequent  times.  It  was  pre¬ 
cluded  by  its  very  presuppositions  from  keeping  pace  with  the  move¬ 
ment  of  things.  The  changes  in  economic  and  industrial  conditions 
throughout  the  nineteenth  century  literally  made  man  over  again  so 
that  he  was  a  new  being  with  new  capacities  and  needs  and  obligations. 
But  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  doctrine  of  natural  rights,  there  are 
no  capacities  or  needs  or  obligations  other  than  those  implied  in  the 
nature  of  man.  If  man  has  seemed  to  change,  so  much  the  worse  for 
man.  The  conditions  which  may  seem  to  create  new  capacitites  or 
to  impose  new  obligations  or  to  require  new  standpoints  and  standards 
are  abnormal;  they  are  to  be  ignored;  the  measure  of  what  can  be 
done  by  man  and  for  man  is  determined  by  his  nature;  all  efforts  at 
economic  and  industrial  betterment  must  prove  their  validity  by  refer¬ 
ence  to  what  man  everlastingly  is,  independent  of  the  exigencies  of 
time  and  place. 

So  much  for  the  social  and  political  theory  characteristic  of  the  second 
stage  of  the  process  of  social  and  religious  development.  The  religious  ex¬ 
perience  and  theological  imagery  appropriate  to  this  type  of  theory,  as  we 
have  seen,  centered  in  the  doctrine  of  the  “  fatherhood  of  God  and  the 
brotherhood  of  man.”  Now  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  conception  of 
God  as  father  and  man  as  brother  marked  a  decided  advance  in  religious 
attitudes  and  activities,  just  as  the  doctrine  of  natural  rights  expressed 
a  higher  level  of  social  and  political  theory  and  introduced  beneficent 
innovations  in  the  actual  life  of  the  times.  But,  theologically  speak¬ 
ing,  men  were  still  dependent  on  a  power  not  themselves.  Whatever 
new  there  was  in  their  religious  experience  in  the  way  of  emotional 
satisfaction  as  a  result  of  conceiving  God  as  their  father  and  mankind 
as  their  brethren  was  given.  The  new  religious  values  were  donations 
vouchsafed  by  a  divine  paternalism  or  a  human  fraternalism.  They 
were  once  for  all  the  sort  of  things  to  be  expected  from  such  relation¬ 
ships.  If  other  things  seemed  good  and  desirable  in  the  way  of  social 
justice  and  industrial  co-operation,  calling  for  attitudes  and  activities 
other  than  those  growing  out  of  the  relation  of  man  to  God  as  his  father, 
or  to  humanity  as  his  brethren,  these  other  good  and  desirable  things, 
together  with  the  attitudes  and  activities  appropriate  to  them,  lay 


46 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


outside  the  scope  of  religion.1  Religion  need  not,  indeed,  exhaust  itself 
in  the  emotional  satisfactions  to  be  realized  from  the  relation  sustained 
to  God  and  to  humanity.  It  might  give  concrete  expression  to  its 
doctrines  if  occasion  seemed  to  warrant  it.  It  might  practice  charity, 
philanthropy,  humanitarianism;  these  are  the  things  that  are  to  be 
expected  in  a  world  where  all  men  are  dependent  on  God  and  where 
some  are  more  highly  blessed  than  others.  But  as  for  inquiring  into 
the  whys  and  wherefores  of  a  social  order  in  which  certain  classes  are 
dependent  on  certain  other  classes  and  in  which  all  classes  are  dependent 
on  a  power  not  themselves,  whose  favors  are  to  be  had  by  petition  and 
faith  and  childlike  obedience,  with  such  an  inquiry  religion  would  have 
nothing  to  do. 

It  must  be  obvious  that  any  conception  of  the  divine  merely  in 
terms  of  sovereignty  and  kinship  are  hopelessly  inadequate  to  express 
the  interests  and  ideals  of  present-day  life,  which  are  felt  to  be 
supremely  worth  while.  The  economic  and  industrial  conditions  today 
are  demanding  a  new  type  of  social  organization,  a  new  democracy, 
handicapped  by  no  preconceptions  as  to  the  natural  rights  of  man, 
nor  by  any  preconceptions  as  to  his  natural  needs,  capacities,  or  obliga¬ 
tions.  To  meet  this  demand  there  is  the  ever-growing  conviction  that 
social  life  and  social  development  are  not  guided  from  without  or 
directed  from  above;  that  these  constitute  a  process  that  is  self- 
determined  and  creative;  and  that  the  rights  that  are  natural  to  man 
are  those  which  have  proved  themselves  in  terms  of  social  worth  within 
this  process.  “We  are  coming  to  the  new  thought  that  society  is 
guided — if  we  may  still  use  that  word — not  by  king  or  class,  but  by  the 
infinite  action  and  reaction  of  all  its  members.2  In  a  genuinely  demo¬ 
cratic  society  there  are  no  privileged  classes.  The  differentiation  of 
classes,  characteristic  of  the  older  orders  of  society,  must  give  way  to 
a  differentiation  of  persons.  But  if  the  differentiation  of  persons  is 
the  goal  of  a  democratic  society,  this  is  not  to  be  accomplished  by  any 
a  priori  recognition  of  personality  as  something  which  is  already  given 
and  which  needs  only  to  be  recognized.  Personality  is  never  given  as 
a  natural  and  inalienable  endowment;  it  has  to  be  achieved.  And  it 
is  the  task  of  a  democratic  society  to  achieve  it  or  create  it  in  the  persons 

1  It  is  important  to  recall  that  the  great  movements  in  the  direction  of  social 
and  industrial  reforms  that  characterized  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries 
had  their  origins  outside  the  pale  of  orthodox  religion. 

2  H.  A.  Overstreet,  “The  Democratic  Conception  of  God,”  Hibbert  Journal , 
XI,  402. 


GOD 


47 


of  its  members.  To  this  end,  the  members  of  such  a  society  must  share 
in  full  the  social  and  moral  responsibilities  involved.  If  the  govern¬ 
ment  is  to  be  for  the  people,  it  must  be  of  the  people  and  by  the  people. 
And  it  is  the  spectacle  of  a  people  leading  themselves  and  thereby 
achieving  larger  capacities  for  leadership,  realizing  new  qualities  of 
of  personality,  that  presents  the  goal  and  poses  the  problems  of  true 
democracy. 

Now  the  assurance  with  which  the  democracy  of  today  looks  toward 
this  goal  and  undertakes  the  solution  of  these  problems  is  not  the  senti¬ 
mental  optimism  or  the  dogmatic  certainty  of  eighteenth-century 
society.  Democracy  has  learned  by  bitter  experience  that  men  may 
have  rights  and  yet  be  victims  of  injustice  a'nd  oppression.  The  posses¬ 
sion  of  rights,  fulminated  for  mankind  before  society  with  its  moving, 
changing,  growing  life  began,  somehow  has  not  availed  to  secure  to  men 
actual  well-being  in  concrete  social  situations.  Democracy  has  found 
that  the  only  rights  worth  having  are  those  which  are  achieved  within 
the  process  and  with  reference  to  the  situations  in  which  they  are  to 
operate;  that  rights  are  functions  which  articulate  themselves  in  con¬ 
nection  with  a  social  dialectic  and  always  imply  certain  counterparts 
in  the  way  of  capacities,  needs,  obligations,  and  the  like.  And  what¬ 
ever  assurance  democracy  has  with  reference  to  its  future  is  grounded 
in  the  fact  that  no  rights  ever  are  given;  that  these  must  be  achieved, 
and  achieved  in  a  competition  with  other  possible  rights  such  as  is  calcu¬ 
lated  to  carry  the  life  of  society  along,  to  raise  it  to  higher  and  higher 
levels.  In  the  process  of  achieving  their  rights,  men  have  learned  the 
art  of  living  together  and  have  come  to  realize  all  their  satisfactions 
and  values  in  so  living.  The  successful  issues  of  social  intercourse, 
with  all  the  ways  and  means  devised  for  making  these  possible,  have 
given  rise  to  a  freer  spirit,  a  social  idealism,  a  moral  venturesomeness, 
which  is  ever  devising  new  ways  and  means  for  effecting  other  pros¬ 
perous  issues  of  social  life,  for  realizing  new  social  values.  And  it  is 
this  social  idealism,  this  moral  venturesomeness,  objectifying  itself 
through  the  methods  and  achievements  of  science,  that  furnishes  the 
new  democracy  with  its  motive  power  and  fills  it  with  hope  for  the 
future. 

Now  it  is  obvious  that  this  new  type  of  social  organization,  this 
new  democracy,  “making  itself,  lifting  itself  through  its  very  imper¬ 
fections — through  the  struggle  of  these  with  one  another — to  planes 
of  more  effective  realization/’1  must  have  a  profound  bearing  on  our 

1  Robert  A.  Woods,  “Democracy,  a  New  Unfolding  of  Human  Powers,”  Studies 
in  Philosophy  and  Psychology  by  Former  Students  of  Charles  Edward  Garman,  p.  128. 


48 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


future  conceptions  of  the  divine.  If  we  are  justified  in  our  contention 
that  dominant  types  of  social  or  political  organization  have  been  the 
determining  factor  in  fixing  the  content  of  the  God-idea  at  the  several 
levels  of  culture  where  this  concept  has  appeared,  we  may  say  that  the 
God  of  the  future  must  be  a  democratic  God;  that  whatever  else  we 
mean  by  the  divine  as  it  is  now  constituted,  we  must  mean  a  power, 
that  is,  in  a  very  fundamental  sense,  we  ourselves.  The  most  effectively 
divine  power  or  agency  in  the  world  today  is  the  social  consciousness 
of  a  genuinely  democratic  community.  It  is  the  social  consciousness  as 
the  ideal  embodiment  of  the  hard- won  values  of  mankind  that  is  effect¬ 
ing  whatever  of  good  there  is  in  our  present-day  life  and  civilization. 
And  this  effectiveness  of  the  social  consciousness  in  controlling  and 
directing  the  movement  of  things  is  nothing  more  than  is  to  be  expected 
in  view  of  the  increasingly  effective  methods  for  creating  and  conserv¬ 
ing  social  values  and  for  bringing  these  to  the  consciousness  of  the 
community.  Progress  in  the  life  of  the  community  as  in  the  life  of  the 
individual  is  conditioned  by  the  availability  of  the  meaningful  aspects 
of  past  experience  for  the  solution  of  present  problems.  But  this 
condition  is  fulfilled  only  as  the  meaningful  aspects  of  experience  are 
idealized,  that  is,  taken  up  into  consciousness  as  permanent  ideas  and 
attitudes.  And  it  is  obvious  that  in  the  case  of  the  community  these 
ideal  embodiments  of  life’s  meanings  and  values  must  be  socialized. 
They  must  be  available  to  the  community  in  its  corporate  capacities; 
they  must  become  permanent  and  effective  parts  of  the  social  conscious¬ 
ness.  To  this  end,  there  must  be  such  methods  of  social  control  and 
such  devices  for  social  intercommunication  as  are  calculated  to  create 
and  sustain  a  social  consciousness,  a  corporate  sense  of  common  inter¬ 
ests  and  common  values.  And  as  we  have  had  occasion  to  observe  in 
another  connection,  this  is  precisely  the  significance  of  the  scientific 
and  educational  movements  of  today.  We  have  seen  how  important 
these  movements  have  been  in  socializing  men;  in  creating  for  them  a 
common  life,  and  in  making  them  conscious  of  this  common  life.  But 
science  and  education  are  only  in  their  infancy.  It  is  impossible  to 
estimate  what  they  are  destined  to  accomplish  in  the  way  of  social 
control.  It  has  been  only  in  the  last  few  years  that  they  have  had 
anything  like  a  free  hand  and  an  open  field  in  directing  human  affairs. 
Until  recently  the  ideals  of  education  and  the  methods  of  science  were 
for  the  most  part  academic  and  devoid  of  social  significance.  They 
were  confined  almost  exclusively  to  classrooms  and  laboratories.  What¬ 
ever  they  effected  in  the  way  of  social  control  accrued  to  the  benefit 


GOD 


49 


of  a  favored  few  who  happened  to  be  within  the  radius  of  their  influ¬ 
ence.  They  served  to  promote  a  sort  of  intellectual  aristocracy  which 
had  its  counterpart  in  certain  social  arrangements  and  economic  prefer¬ 
ments  based  on  class  differentiation.  The  most  lamentable  result  of 
such  an  isolation  of  science  and  education  was  that  these  movements 
were  thereby  precluded  from  fulfilling  their  true  functions  as  instru¬ 
ments  of  control.  In  spite  of  the  institutions  of  learning  that  had  been 
founded  from  time  to  time  through  the  munificence  of  philanthropic 
individuals,  ignorance,  vice,  and  misery  continued  to  prevail  throughout 
the  land.  It  was  not  merely  that  the  majority  of  the  people  were 
prevented  by  physical  circumstances  from  utilizing  instruments  of 
culture;  the  real  difficulty  lay  in  the  fact  that  there  was  no  proper 
appreciation  of  the  social  significance  of  these  instruments.  And  this 
difficulty  was  overcome  (in  so  far  as  it  has  been  overcome)  not  so  much 
through  the  channels  of  formal  education,  as  through  the  liberalizing 
effects  of  industry  and  commerce.  The  inventions  of  science,  furnishing 
as  they  did  the  implements  of  industry  and  the  instruments  of  social 
intercourse,  placed  men  in  the  midst  of  an  immeasurably  more  inti¬ 
mate  and  intricate  life  than  they  had  known  before  and,  what  is  of 
greater  moment,  made  them  conscious  of  their  common  life  thus  created 
and  sustained.  Growing  out  of  this  new  social  consciousness,  this 
new  sense  of  the  intimacy  and  intricacy  of  life’s  relationships,  was  an 
intense  moral  earnestness,  an  anxiety  for  the  general  welfare,  a  so¬ 
cial  idealism,  that  demanded  to  be  informed  as  to  the  ways  and 
means  of  social  control.  Responding  to  this  demand,  science  and 
education  have  at  last  come  into  their  own.  Everywhere  there  is  a  new 
appreciation  of  the  institutions  of  culture,  a  new  insight  into  their 
real  significance  and  their  full  possibilities.  This  is  what  we  mean 
by  the  social  and  scientific  point  of  view.  It  is  the  most  hopeful  sign 
of  the  times  and  is  destined  to  become  increasingly  effective  in  defining 
social  ends,  in  creating  social  values,  and  in  bringing  the  community 
to  a  full  consciousness  of  these  ends  and  values. 

So  we  insist  upon  a  democratic  conception  of  God,  as  an  instrument 
of  control  in  religious  experience.  And  we  await  with  confidence  the 
development  of  a  type  of  imagery  and  a  set  of  symbols  appropriate  to 
such  a  conception.  Furthermore,  we  believe  that  many  of  the  aesthetic 
and  emotional  values  embodied  in  traditional  conceptions  of  the  divine 
will  be  carried  over  and  will  find  suitable  vehicles  of  expressions  in  the 
new  imagery  and  symbols. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


RELIGIOUS  WORSHIP  AND  SOCIAL  CONTROL1 

It  is  possible  to  distinguish  at  least  two  aspects  of  religion.  In 
the  first  place,  there  are  the  immediate  appreciative  experiences  which 
constitute  direct  and  first-hand  contact  with  the  divine.  From  this 
point  of  view  religion  is  a  mode  of  experiencing  which  exists  in  its  own 
right.  It  is  controlled  by  a  type  of  interest  as  definite  and  as  engaging 
as  that  controlling  any  other  of  the  outstanding  pursuits  of  human 
life,  however  complex  it  may  prove  to  be.  Like  other  human  interests 
it  has  its  roots  in  certain  instinctive  needs  and  desires.  Its  affective 
quality  is  a  feeling  of  worth  or  a  sense  of  value.  But  there  is  another 
aspect  of  religion,  namely,  the  reaction  of  the  immediate  appreciative 
experiences  constituting  the  religionist’s  sense  of  the  divine  upon  the 
other  areas  of  his  experience.  From  this  point  of  view,  the  function 
of  religion  in  its  relation  to  social  practice  in  general  may  be  said  to  be 
the  maintenance  of  such  a  direct  and  vital  contact  with  the  divine  as 
to  induce  the  acceptance  and  practice  of  the  standards  of  value 
embodied  therein.  The  specific  character  of  the  reaction  of  religious 
experience  upon  other  areas  of  experience  in  any  given  period  depends 
upon  the  character  of  the  values  or  ideals  constituting  the  divine  in 
that  period  and  at  that  level  of  culture.  For  example,  in  the  Middle 
Ages  religious  values  were  otherworldly,  and  the  appreciation  of  these 
values  worked  itself  out  in  a  manner  of  life  that  was  ascetic  and  mo¬ 
nastic.  In  striking  contrast,  the  religious  values  of  our  modern  period 
have  to  do  with  the  world  that  now  is;  and  the  reaction  of  the  experi¬ 
ence  controlled  by  these  values  has  been  in  the  direction  of  a  practical 
humanitarianism.  The  mystic  and  the  saint  have  been  replaced  by 
the  reformer  and  the  social  worker.  And  indeed,  it  must  be  said  that 
the  church  is  fast  losing  sight  of  the  devotional  or  appreciative  aspect 
of  its  life,  and  is  becoming  more  and  more  a  center  of  social  service. 

Now  this  tendency  on  the  part  of  conventional  religion  to  shift  its 
center  of  gravity  to  extra-mural  activities  to  the  neglect  of  the  appre¬ 
ciative  or  devotional  aspect  of  its  life  is  regarded  by  many  with  entire 

1  The  substance  of  this  chapter  appeared  in  an  article  in  the  International  Journal 
of  Ethics ,  Vol.  XXIX  (October,  1918),  under  the  same  title  and  is  reproduced  here 
with  the  permission  of  that  Journal. 


50 


RELIGIOUS  WORSHIP  AND  SOCIAL  CONTROL 


51 


satisfaction.  To  others,  however,  it  has  its  dubious  aspects.  It 
denotes  a  dearth  of  religious  ideas  and  ideals.  It  bespeaks  an  impov¬ 
erished  type  of  religious  experience.  It  harks  back  to  an  order  of 
religious  values  belonging  to  the  past.  The  church’s  program  of  social 
service  has  back  of  it  the  doctrine  of  the  “fatherhood  of  God  and  the 
brotherhood  of  man.”  This  doctrine  is  not  an  adequate  statement  of 
our  present-day  religious  values.  It  reflects  a  social  order  which  we 
have  left  behind.  It  represents  the  hypostization  of  conditions  of 
dependence  and  limitation  which  we  today  refuse  to  recognize  as  belong¬ 
ing  to  the  nature  of  things,  much  less  to  set  up  as  religious  ideals.  The 
time  was  when  it  was  an  adequate  statement  of  important  qualities  in 
religious  experience.  Reference  is  made  to  the  rise  of  democracy  in 
the  eighteenth  century.  We  have  seen  in  the  preceding  chapter  that 
the  conception  of  God  as  Father,  announced  by  Jesus  nearly  two  thou¬ 
sand  years  before,  only  came  into  its  own  with  the  development  of  dem¬ 
ocratic  sentiments  and  institutions  in  Western  Europe.  But  we  have 
seen  that  the  democratic  ideals  on  which  the  eighteenth-century  democ¬ 
racy  rested  had  their  roots  in  a  wholly  undemocratic  conception  of  man’s 
nature.  The  rights  of  man  were  given;  they  were  donations  to  man 
from  an  inherent  and  inalienable  humanity.  Metaphysically  speaking, 
man  was  as  dependent  as  ever.  And  however  adequate  the  ideas 
embodied  in  the  traditional  conception  of  God  the  Father  were  for  a 
religious  experience  having  such  a  social  context,  these  ideas  are  not 
entirely  adequate  for  the  religious  of  today.  The  social  context  in 
which  religion  now  functions  gives  promise  of  a  new  type  of  social 
organization,  a  new  democracy  which,  as  was  pointed  out  in  the  pre¬ 
ceding  chapter,  must  have  a  profound  influence  on  our  future  concep¬ 
tions  of  the  divine,  so  much  so  that  the  God  of  the  future  will  be  a 
“democratic  God.” 

Now  the  function  of  religion  with  reference  to  the  democratic  God 
must  be  obvious.  The  empirical  and  practical  values  constituting  the 
divine  as  it  exists  today  must,  in  the  first  place,  become  the  actual 
sources  of  religious  satisfaction;  and  in  thus  serving  the  ends  of  reli¬ 
gious  aspiration  and  worship  they  will  in  turn  become  the  instruments 
of  moral  control.  But  it  must  be  just  as  obvious  that  conventional 
religion  is  not  prepared  to  function  adequately  in  either  of  these  direc¬ 
tions.  Its  channels  of  approach  to  God,  its  means  of  contact  with 
the  divine,  too  often  turn  out  to  be  but  blind  alleys,  ending  in  disil¬ 
lusionment.  Its  forms  of  worship,  its  technique  of  praise  and  prayer, 
do  not  appeal  to  many,  at  least,  of  the  most  sincerely  disposed. 


52 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


Wrought  out  with  reference  to  values  long  since  become  valueless, 
they  now  serve  in  many  cases  to  obstruct  and  distort  religious  experi¬ 
ence.  The  religionist  of  today  asks  for  bread  and  is  given  a  stone. 
He  is  in  search  of  that  which  is  morally  significant  and  spiritually 
worth  while,  and  is  confronted  with  much  that  once  had  meaning  but 
now  is  without  moral  significance  or  spiritual  worth.  In  the  mean¬ 
time,  disillusionment,  disappointment,  and  despair  with  respect  to 
religious  realities  are  the  order  of  the  day. 

And  this  is  not  all.  In  thus  failing  to  afford  emotional  contact 
with  the  divine,  conventional  religion  fails  also  to  provide  that  inner 
type  of  moral  control  which  should  define  its  reaction  on  social  practice 
in  general.  In  consequence  of  this,  resort  must  be  had  to  various 
means  of  external  control.  Penal  systems,  eugenics,  social  service, 
philanthropy — these  are  some  of  the  clumsy  and  ineffectual  extremes 
to  which  society  has  been  driven  in  lieu  of  the  inner  control  that  should 
emanate  from  a  vital  appreciation  of  social  values.  Of  course,  it  is 
not  to  be  expected  that  such  inner  control  shall  ever  be  so  thorough¬ 
going  as  to  require  no  supplementation  by  external  methods.  Doubt¬ 
less,  the  poor — and  the  sick  and  the  sinful  and  the  dependent — we 
have  with  us  always.  But  it  cannot  be  determined  beforehand  what 
limits  there  are  to  a  program  dedicated  to  overcoming  the  prevailing 
conditions  of  dependence  and  limitation.  And  certainly  religion  should 
be  satisfied  with  nothing  less  than  this  as  an  ideal. 

But  the  forms  of  worship  employed  by  conventional  religion  not 
only  fail  to  effect  any  appreciative  contact  with  contemporary  social 
values  with  the  social  control  that  should  follow  therefrom;  these 
forms  actually  serve  to  inhibit  the  progressive  and  constructive  tend¬ 
encies  in  the  experience  of  the  worshiper,  and  to  reinforce  the  conserva¬ 
tive  and  non-progressive  tendencies.  And  this  is  not  to  be  wondered 
at.  As  has  been  pointed  out,  these  forms  and  ceremonies  and  rituals 
speak  a  language  that  is  foreign  to  present-day  experience.  They 
reflect  a  social  system  long  since  left  behind.  They  represent  the 
hypostization  of  conditions  of  dependence  and  limitation  which  we 
now  refuse  to  recognize  as  belonging  to  the  nature  of  things,  much 
less  to  set  up  as  religious  ideals.  They  place  a  premium  upon  such 
things  as  blind  credulity,  simple  childlike  faith,  abject  dependence,  and 
dumb  acquiescence.  They  contemplate  a  source  of  good  and  an  order 
of  values  whose  control  is  capricious  and  arbitrary.  They  presuppose 
a  moral  dualism  which,  if  accepted  by  the  worshiper,  must  disrupt  his 
experience,  and  make  it  forever  impossible  for  him  to  be  at  one  with 


RELIGIOUS  WORSHIP  AND  SOCIAL  CONTROL 


53 


himself.  Finally,  they  induce  a  type  of  righteousness  that  is  self- 
complacent  and  condescending,  and  whose  fruits  are  the  various  forms 
of  social  service. 

The  influence  of  all  this  on  the  broad-minded,  forward-looking 
religionist  is  unmistakable.  He  is  a  man  of  faith,  but  his  faith  is  active 
and  creative.  As  a  worshiper  in  the  conventional  church,  however, 
his  faith  becomes  a  matter  of  “simply  trusting,  that  is  all.”  He  has  a 
sense  of  dependence,  knows  the  joy  of  companionship,  experiences  the 
consolations  of  prayer.  Only,  his  sense  of  dependence  is  a  feeling  of 
interdependence,  a  feeling  which  is  at  once  the  foundation  of  his  moral 
character  and  the  source  of  his  moral  well-being;  the  joy  of  companion¬ 
ship  is  for  him  a  consciousness  of  contact  with  a  higher  and  better  self, 
a  contact  which  expands  his  interests,  reinforces  his  purposes,  and 
sustains  his  energies;  and  the  consolations  of  prayer  are  to  him  the 
satisfactions  which  come  to  those  whose  natures  it  is  to  reflect,  to 
appreciate,  and  to  be  reverent.  And  yet,  as  a  conventional  worshiper, 
this  feeling  of  interdependence  reverts  to  a  sense  of  a  private,  personal 
relationship  between  himself  and  another  Being.  The  companionship 
which  he  experiences  is  fraught  with  a  mysticism  that  is  well-nigh 
uncanny.  And  the  prayers  which  should  console  him  are  for  the  most 
part  plaintive  petitions  for  miraculous  interventions  which  no  one 
expects  to  happen. 

But  the  influence  of  conventional  worship  on  the  conservative, 
non-progressive  religionist  is  just  as  unmistakable.  Here,  however, 
the  influence  is  to  be  seen  in  the  reaction  of  religious  experience  on  the 
other  areas  of  experience.  For  example,  one’s  pursuit  of  social  or 
economic  ends  may  be  devoid  of  any  regard  for  considerations  of  justice 
or  equal  opportunity  or  the  right  to  self-realization.  As  a  conventional 
worshiper,  however,  the  religionist  will  be  moved  to  certain  acts  of 
social  compensation.  He  will  contribute  his  money,  and  perhaps  his 
time  and  influence,  to  the  support  of  movements  designed  to  overcome, 
or  at  least,  to  mitigate  conditions  for  which  his  soda]  and  economic 
practices  are  partly  responsible.  And  it  is  not  that  he  is  a  member  of 
a  religious  organization  which  accepts  his  contributions  by  way  of 
making  the  best  of  a  bad  situation  in  whose  creation  it  had  no  part. 
It  is  not  that  the  church  merely  acquiesces  in  and  tacitly  approves  of 
“service”  and  “uplift”  and  “reform”  as  forms  of  social  and  moral  compen¬ 
sation.  The  fundamental  values  embodied  in  the  church’s  conception  of 
the  divine,  and  held  out  to  the  religionist  as  the  sources  of  his  emotional 
satisfacton  and  the  sanctions  of  his  social  practice  are  themselves 


54 


SOME  RELIGIOUS  IMPLICATIONS  OF  PRAGMATISM 


feudalistic;  they  imply  a  hierarchical  structure  of  reality;  they  repre¬ 
sent  conditions  of  dependence  and  limitation  as  belonging  to  the  very 
nature  of  things.  And  appreciative  contact  with  these  values  actually 
serves  to  reinforce  a  type  of  social  practice  that  is  feudalistic.  The 
churches  are  full  of  devout  communicants  whose  methods  of  conduct¬ 
ing  their  business  and  whose  standards  in  dealing  with  their  competitors, 
their  employees  and  the  public,  are  about  as  far  removed  from  the 
democratic  ideals  of  justice  and  equal  opportunity  and  self-realization 
as  could  well  be  imagined.  These  devout  religionists  are  not  neces¬ 
sarily  hypocrites.  They  are  the  mainstays  of  the  church.  They  are 
devoted  to  the  church’s  social  program.  And  they  are  possessed  of 
good  consciences,  withal.  What  manner  of  men  are  they  then  ?  How 
is  one  to  account  for  them?  One  must  account  for  them  by  saying 
that  they  are  intellectually  and  emotionally  oblivious  to  the  new  order 
of  social  values  and  ideals.  And  one  of  the  agencies  responsible  for 
their  moral  backwardness  is  the  church,  with  its  inadequate  doctrines 
and  out-of-date  rituals. 

The  church  must  rehabilitate  the  devotional  or  appreciative  side 
of  its  life.  It  must  not  content  itself  with  being  a  center  of  social 
service.  Its  true  end  is  to  be  a  source  of  emotional  satisfaction  and 
moral  inspiration.  It  must  set  for  itself  the  task  of  creating  a  new 
type  of  religious  experience.  It  must  concern  itself  with  inducing  the 
acceptance  and  practice  of  standards  of  value  which  will  reduce  its 
erstwhile  efforts  at  service  and  uplift  and  reform  to  a  desperate  last 
resort.  To  this  end,  it  must  revise  its  creeds  and  rituals.  A  new  set 
of  symbols  and  a  new  type  of  imagery  must  be  forthcoming.  New 
bottles  must  be  provided  for  the  new  wine. 


